Text copyright © 2018 by Robert Beatty

Cover illustration © 2018 by Millie Liu

(Minty Fresh Mangos)

Cover design by Maria Elias

All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney

Book Group.No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storageand retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. For informationaddress Disney •
Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

ISBN 978-1-368-01060-3

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 CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Acknowledgments
About the Author
 The Great Smoky Mountains
1900

As Willa overheard the two day-folk men talking about whether the earth was
flat or round, she shook her head. They were both wrong. The world was
neither flat nor round. It wasmountains.
W illa crept through the darkened forest, following the faint
scent of chimney smoke on the midnight air. The silver
strands of the clouds passing in front of the moon cloaked
her movements in shadow, and she made little sound stepping
across the cold, wet leaves she felt beneath her bare feet.
All during the night she’d been moving down the slope of the
mountain into the small valley where the homesteaders lived.
When she came to the rocky edge of the river, she knew she
was getting close to what she’d come for.
She didn’t know the river’s mood here, so she avoided
the dark and dangerous currents by climbing up through the
gnarled limbs of the craggy old trees and asking for their
help. As the branches reached out over the water to hold her,
they rustled in the wind, talking to one another, as if
concerned about where she was going. Her tunic of woven green
cane flexed with the movements of her body as she climbed,
the branches of the trees holding her gently, intertwining
wrist and arm, ankle and leg, then letting go in turn,
helping her across with the care that they would give a
sapling granddaughter. She made her way hand over hand above
the misty breath of the tumbling river, then slithered down a
trunk on the other side.
“Thank you,” she whispered to the trees, touching
one’s bark with the palm of her hand as she left them behind
her.
Passing a tranquil pool of starlit water among the stones
at the river’s edge, she glimpsed her reflection: a twelve-
year-old willow wisp of a forest girl with long, dark hair, a
rounded face with streaked and spotted skin, and emerald-
green eyes. Unlike most of her clan, who coveted the
glittering treasures of their enemies and even wore their
deadened clothes, Willa wore no fabric or jewelry of any kind
that might flash in the gloom. Wherever she went in the
forest, her skin and hair and eyes took on the color and
appearance of the green leaves around her. If she paused near
the trunk of a tree, she turned so brown and barken that she
became nearly invisible. And now, as she looked into the
water, she saw her face for just a moment before it took on
the color of the water and the nighttime sky above her and
she disappeared, her dark blue cheeks dotted with glistening
stars.
Continuing toward what she’d come for, Willa slunk low
and quiet through the mountain laurel, up the gentle riverine
slope, her heart beating slow and steady as she approached
the homesteaders’ lair.
She came from a clan of forest people that the Cherokee
called “the old ones” and told stories about around their
campfires at night. The white-skinned homesteaders referred
to her kind as night-thieves, or sometimes night-spirits,
even though she was as flesh and blood as a deer, a fox, or
any other creature of the forest. But she seldom heard the
true name of her people. In the old language—which she only
spoke with her grandmother now—her people were called the
Faeran.
Willa stopped at the edge of the forest and blended her
skin into the surrounding textures of green. Tendrils of
leaves wrapped around her. She became all but invisible.
The soft sounds of the night’s insects and frogs
surrounded her. But she stayed alert, wary of beady-eyed
dogs, hidden watchmen, and other dangers.
She gazed toward the lair of the homesteaders. They had
built it with the cut-up carcasses of murdered trees nailed
one to the other in long slabs. The bodies of the dead trees
made flat walls with square corners, unlike anything else in
the forest.
Just get what you came for, Willa, she told herself.
The lair had a high, slanted rooftop, a large railed
porch that came around the front, and a chimney made of
jagged rock the homesteaders had broken from the bones of the
river. She saw no oil lamps or candlelight in the windows,
but she knew from the thin line of gray smoke drifting from
the chimney that the homesteaders—whom she sometimes called
the day-folk, because they retreated into their lairs when
the sun went down—were probably sleeping inside in their
long, flat, pillowed beds.
She knew from experience that the homesteaders in this
area locked the doors of their lairs at night, so she had to
be clever. Through an open window? Down the chimney? She
studied the lair for a long time, looking for a way in. And
then she saw it. In the lower part of the front door, the
owner of the lair had fashioned a smaller door for his white-
fanged companion to come and go.
And that was his mistake.
Her heart began to pound, for her body knew the time had
come, and the leaves withdrew from around her. She emerged
from the cover of the forest and quickly darted across the
open grassy area that surrounded the lair. She hated open
areas. Her legs felt strange and uneven as she ran across the
unnaturally flat ground. She dashed up the steps to the
wooden porch. Then she slipped down onto her hands and knees,
pushed through the little door, and crawled into the darkened
lair to begin the night’s take.
O nce inside the walls of the lair, Willa scurried out of the
moonlight filtering in through the window. She hunkered down
on the floor in the shadowed corner of the eating place, the
small quills on the back of her neck rising up as her eyes
scanned the darkness for danger.
Where’s the biting dog? she wondered. Are all the day-
folk upstairs in their beds?
 Holding her breath, she slithered across the floor and
looked out into the main room of the lair for attackers.
She waited, she watched, and she listened.
If they caught her here—actually inside their lair—they
would kill her. They had hacked the trees of the forest and
hunted the animals. They had murdered her mother, her father,
her twin sister, and so many others of the Dead Hollow lair.
The day-folk did not think. They did not hesitate. Whether it
was the wolves who howled to find their loved ones in the
night, or the great trees who raised their limbs to the sun,
the day-folk killed whatever they did not understand. And
they understood very little of the forest into which they had
come.
As she pulled in a slow and steady, tightly controlled
breath, she heard the sound of the small metal-wound machine
ticking on the fireplace mantel and the slow hiss and crackle
of the dying embers that had led her here to the lair.
The scent of something startlingly sweet reached her
nose. She tried to ignore it, but her stomach growled. She
turned to see a round, stonelike container sitting on a flat
wooden surface above her. She knew she shouldn’t let this
distract her, but she’d been so hungry yesterday and all
through the night.
She quickly rose up, lifted the container’s lid, and
gobbled down several of the small, crumbly lumps inside like
a ravenous raccoon. As her mouth watered with the sweet
flavor, she couldn’t help but smile, but she was careful not
to leave any crumbs that the day-folk might notice. She
wanted to eat more of the lumps, but she stuffed half of what
remained into her woven-reed satchel and hurried on her way.
As she snuck into the main room, she noticed a rectangle
of tin with a mottled depiction of several of the day-folk,
as though they had looked into their reflection in the pool
beside the river and never escaped: a clean-shaven man, a
dark-haired woman, two little ones maybe five and six years
old, and a tiny crawler in the woman’s arms. But Willa
didn’t look at them for long, because she didn’t like to
think about their souls inside the metal.
Get what you came for, she told herself again and pressed
on.
Glancing nervously at the stairway as she worked, she
quickly searched the main room for valuables. She found a
small wooden box filled with a moist, brown substance that
she was pretty sure was chewing tobacco. She stuffed half of
it into her satchel. It wasn’t the kind of takings she was
keen for, but she knew the padaran
, the leader of her clan,
would be pleased by this special gift. She could see herself
standing before his looming figure as she emptied her satchel
in front of him, his eyes gleaming with approval.
Feeling pleased with herself, she continued on. In a very
small, tightly enclosed room filled with nothing but clothing
hanging down from strange, shoulder-like shapes, she found a
long, dark overcoat with a leather wallet and coins in the
pockets, and she smiled. She took half the bills and half the
coins. These were the takings the padaran had trained her to
find.
The padaran sent her and the other jaetters—the young
hunter-thieves of the clan—out each night, and he gave his
love to the ones who returned with their satchels full of
coins or anything else of value.
She glanced at the stairway again, knowing that when
danger came it would come down those stairs. She’d already
had a good take, and she knew that a wise jaetter left when
the leaving was good, but she wanted more.
When she’d returned to Dead Hollow the night before, her
satchel had been light, and the padaran had struck her face
so hard with the back of his hand that she’d fallen to the
ground, astonished and ashamed to be wiping the blood from
her mouth. Over the last few months, she’d thought that she
had become his favorite, but now he had struck her, just as
he did the other jaetters, and she still felt the fire of it
on her cheek. Tonight she wanted more, more than she had ever
taken before, to prove to the padaran and the rest of the
clan what she could do.
Finally, she went over to the bottom of the stairs,
cupped her hands behind her ears, and closed her eyes,
listening to the rooms above. She heard a man snoring, and
there were probably other day-folk up there, too, a little
clutch of them, sleeping away the night.
But where’s the dog? she wondered again. The dog is
death. She’d run into trouble with the fanged beasts before,
with their loud barking and their vicious, biting, scratching
attacks. I can smell the wretched creature around here
someplace, she thought. I used its door to get in. But where
is it? Why hasn’t it come charging out at me with its
snapping teeth?
Most of her fellow jaetters stole things from unattended
wagons, midnight yards, and dark-morning barns when there
were no day-folk around. Very few ever dared to sneak into
the day-folk lairs, and none would do it when the day-folk
were actually inside. The jaetters had been trained to go out
together in small groups, and to never take such risks. But
she put her foot on the first step and began to creep up the
creaky wooden staircase, treading as lightly as she could on
the strangely flat surfaces, so unlike anything she
encountered in the forest.
When she reached the top of the stairs, her legs trembled
as she inched slowly through a narrow, cavelike tunnel toward
the open doorway of the first room. In the forest she could
use her camouflage and her other powers, but her powers
didn’t work in the inner world of the day-folk. Here she
could be seen, she could be captured, she could be killed.
Her palms were sweating as she slowly peeked into the
sleeping man’s room.
She had noticed on her other takes that the day-folk
seemed to sleep in twos. But this man was sleeping alone, on
one side of the large bed, as if the one he slept with was
gone. But there beside him was the biting dog she’d been
looking for—a shaggy black-and-white fiend, lying fast
asleep beside its master, its white fangs and sharp claws
visible in the moonlight.
The man’s face was bristled with whiskers and he was
lying on top of the covers, his clothes torn and wrinkled, as
if he had collapsed there in exhaustion. A chair and a small
table and other day-folk things had been knocked to the floor
as if there had been some sort of struggle. There was a wound
on the man’s head and a mat of dried blood on the dog’s
shoulder.
Seeing the blood, Willa’s heart pounded heavily in her
chest, and she swallowed hard. Had they attacked one of the
animals of the forest and been entangled in a battle?
But then she frowned in confusion. If they had fought
something in the forest, that wouldn’t explain the knocked-
over furniture in the room.
And then she saw it. Lying in the bed next to the man and
his dog, there was a long piece of metal with a wooden stock
and what looked like two iron pipes side by side.
That’s a killing-stick, she thought, right there beside
them. She drew in a ragged, unsteady breath and fought the
urge to run.
W illa looked at the killing-stick with dread. She’d never
seen one this close. She didn’t know how they worked, but
she’d watched enough hunters in her woods to know their
wicked power. She’d seen deer struck dead from a distance,
hawks killed in midair. During the previous winter, she’d
found a wounded wolf lying on the forest floor and bandaged
her wounds with healing leaves so that she could get back to
her starving pups.
 The man lay with his eyes closed in the bed. His hands
moved restlessly beside his body, touching the killing-stick
and the exhausted dog as he muttered in his troubled sleep.
Willa knew she should go, but she also knew that some of
the most valuable things in the lair would be in this very
room.
Into the room she crept, nothing but a shift of darkness
moving through the shadows. Slipping over to the dresser, she
quickly snatched half of the necklaces and earrings she found
in the jewelry box, liking the weight of her satchel more and
more.
The little ones in her clan who didn’t steal, and steal
well, didn’t get fed. It was the way the padaran had run the
clan since before she was born. If you didn’t return to the
lair with your satchel full, you didn’t get dinner, and if
it happened two nights in a row, you’d get worse than that.
The padaran had told her many times that the day-folk were
rich and didn’t need their money or their belongings, and
when she looked at everything the day-folk had, she thought
it must be true. But she also thought maybe it was better to
take only half of what she found and leave the rest behind,
just in case the day-folk and their children were hungry,
too.
She had stolen from many of the homesteads along this
river. Stealing only half of what she found made her takings
less noticeable. Move without a sound. Steal without a trace.
That was what she had taught herself. If the day-folk were
truly rich, then they wouldn’t notice a few things missing
come morning. Of course, she could never tell the padaran
about her rule of halves—he’d thrash her until the stream
that ran beneath their lair turned red—but she was very good
at stealing, and he was usually well pleased with her take.
She knew she was one of his favorites, and she was determined
to keep it that way.
Her grandmother, her mamaw, whom she loved with all her
heart, had told her that there had once been a time when the
Faeran had lived in the forest desiring nothing but what the
forest could provide them. But when the homesteaders came
cutting with their axes and building their candlelit homes in
the woods, the Faeran began to change—their words, their
wants, their ways. Sometimes, when Willa was way out in the
forest alone, apart from the rest of the clan, she felt the
power of the forest and its creatures deep inside her, and
she knew that her mamaw was telling her the truth. There had
been a time before.
The man jerked in his sleep, snorted loudly, and took a
sudden gasping breath. Willa leapt back in surprise, her
limbs flooded cold with fear, but then the man mumbled
something in the darkness as if he was fighting something in
his dreams, the dog adjusted its position, and the two of
them fell back to sleep.
When Willa started breathing again, she shook her head in
mocking disbelief. That dog was worthless! It couldn’t smell
a thing! She was right here next to them, and it didn’t even
know.
Feeling more confident than ever, she searched the top of
the dresser for more valuables. She noticed a closed black
book with a long red tassel hanging down from the pages. The
book had a short, single-word title that she could not read.
Sitting on the book there was a gold ring. She picked up the
ring and held it up in the moonlight that shone through the
window. It was one of the most beautiful day-folk things she
had ever seen. What is this gleaming thing for? she wondered.
What is its magic?
Noticing a glint of light out of the corner of her eye,
she looked over toward the bed. The sleeping man wore an
identical gold ring on the third finger of his left hand.
She knew she should take the gold ring from the dresser
and run as fast as she could. Take it and leave! she told
herself. It had to be the most valuable thing in the lair,
and it would definitely be the most valuable thing she’d
ever brought back in her satchel. She could imagine the
padaran’s snarling grin as she set the shining gold ring in
his awaiting hands. “This is a good take, girl,” he’d rasp
in pleasure, all the other jaetters ducking and sniveling
around him, their jealousy writhing through them like poison
as they snapped and hissed at her.
But as she held the golden ring in her hand, a sickening
feeling crept through her. She tried to convince herself that
taking one of the rings wasn’t breaking her rule of halves,
but there was something in her that felt strangely uncertain.
Sometimes, two things weren’t just two things; they were a
pair, and a pair was a thing. Half wasn’t always half, she
thought. Sometimes half was whole.
She didn’t know what the rings were for or what they
meant, but it seemed wrong to take one, to separate it from
the other—like tearing a wing from a swallowtail butterfly
and telling herself it could still fly.
Before she could change her mind, she reluctantly set the
ring back on top of the book where she’d found it, and crept
out of the room of the snoring man and his dim-nosed, deaf
dog.
She moved quickly toward the next room, determined to
stay focused.
The next room was draped with dresses. Her heart
quickened at the thought that she was going to see a day-folk
girl up close. The girl’s scent hung in the air, but there
was no little girl sleeping in the room’s bed. The fact that
it was the middle of the night and the girl was gone seemed
very strange. But Willa went over to the girl’s dresser and
took a shiny bracelet, a silver hairpin, several velvet
ribbons, a tiny porcelain doll, and a locket.
As Willa darted down to the next room, it smelled
immediately of boy. She knew it was a day-folk boy, but it
was boy all the same. On a breezy day she could smell boys
from across a meadow, whether they were day-folk or night.
But the boy’s bed was empty as well, the covers twisted onto
the floor.
 Willa’s brows furrowed. Where did the boy go? And where
is the little sister-girl who should have been in the
previous room? And why is the man sleeping with his killing-
stick on his bed?
Get what you came for, she told herself, shaking her head
and continuing on. They were the words she used whenever she
became ensnared in the bewildering details of the day-folk’s
lives. Get what you came for and go, Willa.
She hurriedly searched the boy’s room for valuables.
The first thing she found looked like a large leather
glove made for a giant hand. The boy’s hand must be
grotesquely deformed and misshapen, she thought. Beside the
glove lay a white ball and a stout, wooden walking stick of
some sort. The boy’s legs must be crooked as well. She felt
a little sorry for the poor, crippled creature, but she
stuffed half of his coin collection and half of his Cherokee
arrowheads into her satchel and dashed down the hall toward
the fourth and final room. Get what you came for.
But then her ear twitched and the quills on the back of
her neck stood on end.
The snoring had stopped.
The man had awoken.
She heard the muffled sound of movement, covers being
pulled back. She felt the vibration as his feet hit the
floor.
“Get on up, boy,” the man whispered urgently to his
dog.“They’re back!”
Willa exploded into motion. She sprinted down the length
of the hallway, racing for the top of the stairs.
The man charged out of his bedroom with his killing-
stick. Willa flashed by him, nothing but a dark streak.
He must have been as startled by her as she was by him,
because he lurched back in surprise. She dove headlong down
the darkened stairway, her feet barely touching the steps.
But the startled man raised his weapon and aimed blindly
into the darkness.
 A flash lit the air on fire, and the sound of it shook
the world.
The blast struck her in the back. The force of it knocked
her careening forward. She slammed into the wall at the turn
in the stairway and tumbled down the rest of the stairs like
a raccoon shot from a tree.
The lead shot ripped through her tunic and riddled her
shoulder blade and arm, white-hot lightning piercing through
her body as she crashed onto the floor at the bottom of the
stairway.
The enraged man and his growling dog were charging down
the stairway to finish her off.
Get up, she told herself, trying to find her way through
the pain.Get up, Willa. You’ve got to run!
W illa lay crumpled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs,
her right leg bent badly beneath her left, her arm twisted
under the weight of her body. Her head lay flat against the
boards, blood dripping down into her eyes as she gazed out at
the dead furniture and murdered walls of the shadowed lair.
She could see through her eyes, and she could hear the wheeze
of the air moving in and out of her lungs, but she couldn’t
get her arms and legs to move. The only thing she could feel
was the pain of the blast radiating through her shaking body.
She lay helpless, stunned, and bleeding on the floor.
She felt the man’s footsteps coming down the stairs
behind her. His dog tore out in front of him, a blazing burst
of growling teeth. The beast clamped onto her calf with its
fangs, sending sharp bolts of new pain shooting through her
limbs, jolting her alive. She spun around, screaming, and
struck out with a quick jerking motion. The dog pulled back,
trying to drag her with its teeth, but she wrested herself
free. The snarling beast lunged in for a second bite, but
Willa darted away.
The dog chased her, gnashing its teeth behind her as she
scurried across the eating room floor. She dove through the
dog door, scrambled across the porch, and ran, fleeing out
into the night, desperate to reach the safety of the forest.
The man threw open the door and charged out, aiming his
killing-stick into the darkness. Another shot exploded the
world, shattering the night with a flash of light and a
deafening roar, as Willa scrambled away.
“Get him, boy! Get him!” the man shouted, as the dog
flew off the porch after her. “I’m going to kill you this
time!” he screamed at her.
She knew that she’d been moving so fast through the
darkness of his lair that he hadn’t truly seen her, but he
was angry, far angrier than she expected from a race of
beings who were supposedly so rich that they didn’t need
most of their belongings.
Get to the trees, get to the trees, she thought
frantically as she stumbled across the grass toward the
forest. But she felt dizzy and disoriented, filled with
nothing but pain and panic. Her head throbbed. When that
first blast hit her, it had slammed her against the wall and
then tumbled her down the stairs. Now the blood was oozing
from her head down into her eyes, blurring her vision.
Running nearly blind, she ducked into the first cover she
came to. She scrambled into a small, closed-in place, gasping
for breath, and hoping the dog would pass her by.
All she wanted to do was close her eyes against the pain
and curl up into a little ball, but she knew if she withered
here she’d die. She wiped the blood from her eyes and tried
to look around her. Had she crawled into a hollow log? Maybe
she’d been lucky enough to find a fox den.
But then she smelled something. And it wasn’t fox.
It was goat.
Her heart sank. She’d made it only as far as the
homesteader’s barn.
As she scuttled out of the pen, the startled goats ran
bleating out into the yard and the chickens flew up in a
squawking explosion of feathers.Get to the forest! her mind
kept telling her, but she knew it was too late. She could
hear the man and his dog charging toward the building. She
scurried deeper into the shadows of the barn and hunkered
down to hide.
A debilitating fear gripped her chest. “If they ever
catch you alone in their world, they will kill you, Willa,”
the padaran had told her. “They cut down trees and burn with
fire. They killed your sister and your parents!”
The barn door creaked slowly open.
The flickering light of the lantern entered first and
then the gleaming double barrels of the killing-stick. The
man came in slowly and cautiously. The day-folk were oddly
blind at night. He held up his lantern, straining to see in
the dim light, his weapon pointed in front of him.
Willa lay crumpled, curled up on the floor in the corner,
wounded and bleeding, panting with an exhaustion so all-
consuming that she couldn’t move—like a fawn that had been
shot through her heart and lay on the ground breathing her
last breaths. Willa had the power of the forest animals
within her, but none of her powers worked in this unnatural
place.
She could tell by the man’s careful movement that he
couldn’t quite make out what type of man or beast he’d shot
in the darkness and cornered in his barn. It wasn’t until he
raised his lantern and peered at her at close range that he
got his first good look at her.
She could just imagine what she must look like to him
lying in the dirt like a trapped animal in the corner of his
barn, shaking with fear, her greenish arms and legs pulled up
to her chest, her chest moving up and down with fast, ragged
breaths, and the blood dripping down her face between her
emerald eyes.
When the man finally saw her, and she lifted her eyes and
looked at him, his expression changed from grim determination
to utter astonishment. The viciousness that had consumed him
moments before disappeared as he tried to comprehend what he
was seeing. She saw him realize, in the light of his lantern,
that the thing he’d trapped in his barn wasn’t a man or a
beast.
“Wha…” he began to ask in confusion. “What are you?”
She could hear in the tremor of his voice the realization
that he had shot some kind of strange little forest creature
—not just a creature, but a girl. She didn’t know what he
was expecting, what type of enemy he thought had invaded his
lair in the dead of night, but it was not this, it was not
her.
Willa looked down the double barrels of the killing-stick
pointed at her. This man could shoot her again right here and
now and end it all. All he had to do was pull the trigger. Or
he could strangle her with his bare hands or strike her in
the head with a shovel. Without the powers of the forest, she
could not defend herself from him. She was helpless. But as
she looked into his face she saw something that she did not
think was possible in a day-folk man: kindness .
“I…I don’t understand,” he said in bewilderment.
“Where did you come from? Who are you?”
I’m Willa, she thought, but she did not answer his
question out loud. The padaran had brought the Eng-lish
sounds into their clan long before she was born, and she knew
the sounds well enough to understand him. But whether she was
using the old language or the new, Willa spoke to trees, not
the men who killed them. How could day ever comprehend night?
How could darkness ever know light? How could she say her
name to a man such as this?
“Just hold on…” he said gently, watching her with
steady eyes as he knelt beside her trembling body. He set the
killing-stick and the lantern down onto the dirt floor of the
barn. All the anger and fear that had consumed him moments
before seemed to have disappeared from him now.
So wickedly fast these humans seemed to change their
spirit.
“I’m going to take a look at the wound…” he said as
he pulled a white cloth from his pocket and moved toward her
as though he was going to try to stanch the bleeding.
But he was human. She knew she could not trust him.
She stayed perfectly still. She didn’t move in any way
as his hand came closer and closer.
Her heart pounded in her chest. The moment he touched
her, she sprang to her feet. Startled, he pulled back in
surprise. She darted past him. The dog snapped at her but
missed.
With her last burst of dying energy, she dashed through
the doorway of the barn and out into the darkness. She ran
across the grass. The moment she reached the edge of the
forest, she blended into the night and disappeared.
The last thing she had heard him say as he grabbed his
lantern and his killing-stick was, “Come on, boy. We’re
going after her.”
W illa knew that the darkness of the forest would hinder the
man and his dog for a few minutes, but not for long. The
human would come trudging through the forest, lighting the
way with his box of captured flame and carrying his killing
metal, as all day-folk did. But what she was most worried
about was the dog’s speed through the underbrush and its
powerful sense of smell, which she knew was akin to her own.
She had foolishly scoffed at the dog when it had been fast
asleep, but now that it had tasted her blood, it would be
unstoppable. She had been hunted by dogs before. They were
simple beasts, but relentless on a scent. She picked up a
handful of dirt, raised it to her mouth, and filled it with
her breath. Then she cast it wide behind her, dispersing the
scent of the direction she’d taken.
She stumbled deeper into the forest, pushing through the
spasms of pain from the lead shot that had struck the back of
her shoulder and arm. She crunched leaves and broke small
sticks beneath her treading feet, making noise that she
wouldn’t normally make, but she had to move fast. She had to
escape.
Finally, she came to the reflecting pools at the rocky
edge of the river. She didn’t have the strength to climb up
into the cradling arms of the trees and cross over the top as
she had before, and she was far too weak to wade through the
rapids, but she had to cross the water somehow to throw the
dog off her trail. The dirt she’d cast behind her would
confuse it for a little while, but when the dog came to the
river it would run up and down the shoreline with blind,
sniffing persistence until it found her scent again.
In the far distance behind her, she could hear the sound
of the man’s tromping feet coming in her direction.
She spotted the faint line of a deer trail that ran along
the bank of the river. She knew that deer never crossed or
even waded into fast-moving water, so she followed the trail
hoping it would take her to what she needed.
When she reached a shallow riffle running over the small,
rounded stones of the riverbed, she knew it was her only
chance. She immediately started to cross, but even here the
river dragged at her angrily, the white water bunching up
like mountains around her knees, pulling at her, trying to
drag her in. She fought against it, tried to keep pushing
through it. But she finally lost her balance and collapsed
down into the river, beset with pain, and the cold power of
the water took hold of her and swept her away.
 She kicked and she sputtered, gasping for air in the
churning water, terrified that she was going to drown, but
then the current pulled her quickly forward and slammed her
against a rock. She grabbed hold. The raging water
immediately wanted to tear her away, to pull her down into
its darkest holes, but she gritted her teeth and held on to
the cold, hard surface of the rock. She clung to it.Climb
it, Willa! she told herself. Climb it!
She reached up her hand, found a crevice with her
fingers, and pulled, dragging herself slowly out of the
river.
The back of her shoulder throbbed. Her right arm, and
that whole side of her body, felt numb, like all the blood
had seeped out of it into the churning dark waters of the
greedy river. She crouched down in between the large, jagged,
broken boulders that crowded the river’s edge and asked for
their protection. The cracked, moss-covered rocks towered
over her head, making caves between them where she could
hide. She had always loved the feeling of climbing among
rocks like these, and it gave her comfort to rest among them
now, but she knew she couldn’t stay here. The rush of the
river was drowning out many sounds, but she knew that the man
and his dog were still coming, still on her trail, and they
would find her here. She had to keep going, but she was
exhausted and bleeding.
Her lair and her clan were miles and miles up through the
mountains beyond her reach. She could find no help from
there.
But she could not let herself give up. She needed to find
a way to escape.
She had lived in the forest all her life, and she had
taken pride in helping the animals who needed her care. But
she realized that this time, she was the one who needed help,
or she was going to die.
She lifted her head, tilted her face toward the gleaming
moon, and began to howl. It was a pitiful, soft little sound
at first. She was weak, and not used to making any noise,
especially when enemies were on her trail. But soon she
pulled the pain of her wounds into her throat and she let out
a long, plaintive howl. She howled in the way she had been
taught, not by her mother who’d been killed years before, or
even by her grandmother who’d raised her, but by a mother
she’d befriended the winter before.
As the sound of her howl went out into the night air, she
could imagine it drawing in predators from miles around,
sharp-clawed creatures ready to prey on the weak and wounded
thing she had become. And she could imagine the tracking dog
and killing man raising their heads toward the sound and
knowing they were getting close.
At first, all she could hear was the relentless, rushing
voice of the river, but then she heard a faint sound in the
distance. She stepped out from among the rocks toward the
forest, cupped her hands behind her ears, and listened again.
There, she thought,very far away. It was another howl.
She howled again.
The returning howl sounded much closer now. Whatever it
was, it was moving fast, coming at a run. Her heart began to
thump in her chest. Even though she was the one who had
started the howl, she couldn’t help her legs from shaking.
There was a part of her that was telling her that she had
made a mistake, that she should run now, scurry quickly away,
or duck back down into the rocks and hide.
She heard the beast pushing toward her through the
undergrowth of the forest. She knew what she had done was
dangerous, that it might get her killed.
Very close now, a pair of silvery, moonlit eyes peered at
her from the darkness of the forest.
She took a long, deep breath, used her powers to
consciously slow down her heart, and tried to stay calm. You
can’t back out now, she told herself. You must finish what
you started.
 But then thirty more pairs of eyes appeared in the
forest, all gazing at her. Not just one had come, butmany .
She looked toward the closest pair of eyes gazing at her
from the darkness.
“Un don natra dunum far,” she whispered in the old
I need your help, my friend.
Faeran language.
But at that moment, the light of the man’s flame came
flickering through the trees.
A large wolf emerged from the forest a few feet in front of
her, her silver-gray eyes studying Willa intently.
And then, behind the leader of the pack, she saw the
others—the pale blue eyes of the younger wolves, and the
gray and golden-brown eyes of the older wolves.
These were the great warriors of the forest, the clawers
and the biters, and on any other night they might have
tracked and taken down a little creature like her.
 But Willa looked into the eyes of the leader of the pack,
crouched down to the ground in front of her, and said the
words to her again.
“Un don natra dunum far.”
The leader of the pack stared at her. She was a beautiful
animal, with a thick blackish-gray coat and the muscles of
many hunts. She had a strong nose and mouth, and held her
ears up high, alert for the coming danger—the man and his
dog coming toward them through the forest. Wolves and the
other animals of the forest didn’t have names in the Eng-
lish language of the day-folk, but in the old language, Willa
knew her name was Luthien. She looked so different from the
winter before, when Willa had met her and helped her, when
the wolf had lain on the forest floor, shot by a hunter and
torn by his hounds. And now, by the flow of time, all had
come around.
Luthien lay down on her haunches so close at Willa’s
side that she could feel the warmth of the wolf’s fur
against her shoulder. Wincing in pain, but knowing that it
was her only hope to live, Willa crawled onto the wolf’s
back.
The day-folk man had seen her in his lair and wounded
her. She didn’t understand why he had tried to help her in
the barn, what kind of trick or twist of hatred had compelled
him to such an act, but she knew she could not trust a human.
And she knew that now that he had seen her, he would not let
her go. He and his snarling dog and his clanking box of
captured light and his killing metal were coming, moments
away now, thrashing through the forest, trampling leaf and
breaking branch, to capture her and pull her back into their
world.
As Luthien rose to her feet, Willa wrapped her arms
around the thick scruff of the wolf’s neck.
“The dog in the man’s pack has the nose to track us,”
Willa said in the old language, knowing the wolf would know
what to do.
 As the man and his dog came through the undergrowth of
the forest, Luthien turned and looked at the other wolves of
the pack. With a tilt of her head and a turn of her body, she
gave the command. The other wolves turned and dashed in a
dozen directions into the forest, yipping and yelping as they
ran, as if inviting the coming enemy to pursue them.
The moment they were gone, Luthien lunged into the
darkness and leapt into running speed. Suddenly, Willa was
flying through the forest, her hair whipping behind her. Her
shoulder burned with pain, and the blood from the cut on her
head was dripping onto Luthien’s thick coat, but Willa felt
the joy of it, too, clinging to the wolf’s back, tearing
through the forest faster than she ever had gone. The trunks
of the trees rushed past her. Great jutting rocks flashed by.
The leaves of the bushes were but puffs of air swishing
against her face. She felt the driving beat of the wolf’s
heart against her own, the air surging into the wolf’s
lungs, and the heat pouring out of the wolf’s open mouth as
she ran, her teeth gleaming in the moonlight.
Willa looked into the forest to their left and to their
right to see two strong male wolves running with them,
guarding their flanks. Craning her neck, she saw that two
young wolf pups were following close behind.
She couldn’t see the other wolves of the pack anymore,
but she knew they were out there, running through the forest
in opposite directions. There was no way for even the keenest
tracking dog to follow them all.
“The wolves teach us how to work together,” her mamaw
had told her. “They hunt together, defend their territory
together, play together, and raise their pups together. It’s
through their love for one another that they survive.” Willa
knew she wasn’t a wolf and never could be, but it was the
kind of kinship that she had always longed for.
Leaving the ravine of the river far behind them, Luthien
climbed up through the rocky, forested ridges of the high
ground, taking Willa up the slope of what the Faeran people
called the Great Mountain. The Cherokee called it Kuwa’hi .
But the day-folk called it Clingmans Dome on their maps, made
from the ground-up flesh of trees. It seemed as if all the
locations in her world had many names, old names and new,
night names and day, as if the names, too, were fighting to
possess these ancient places. It was seldom used anymore, but
one of her favorite names for this place was the Smoky
Mountain, for she had seen it say its name many times: in the
waking dawn of each new morning, the white mist of the Smoky
Mountain’s breath floated near its rounded top and out
across the world, flowing down into hidden coves and sweeping
valleys, out to the other mountains and ridges, and down
through the fog-shrouded trees and over the tumbling misty
rivers, as if the Smoky Mountain itself breathed the life
into the world each morning and took it back again each
night.
Dead Hollow, the hidden lair of her people, was way up on
the north slope of the Great Mountain, a place so
treacherously remote, and so shadowed by thick trees and
steep ridges, that no day-folk had ever trodden there.
But as she gazed around her through her blood-blurry
eyes, she realized that wasn’t the direction the wolves were
going.
“Where are we going?” she tried to ask in the old
language, but her voice was too thin and raspy to be heard.
As she clung to Luthien’s back, she felt herself getting
weaker and colder, the sticky blood oozing from her wound and
down her side. She held on desperately to the warmth of
Luthien’s fur, but her eyes drifted shut and she began to
slip away. All she could feel was the undulating motion of
the running wolf.
W hen Willa opened her eyes again, she was still clinging to
Luthien’s back. She wasn’t sure where they were or how much
time had passed, other than that the sun was rising in the
eastern sky, and the blood was still seeping from her aching
body.
The wolves of the pack had come back together with her
and Luthien on a rocky prominence that rose up from the
surrounding terrain. All the wolves were looking in the same
direction.
Wincing from the pain, Willa slowly lifted her head.
The wolves gazed out across a sweeping view of the
mountains, the long blue ranges cascading one layer after
another into the distance, the wispy white clouds hanging low
in the valleys, with the dark peaks and ridges rising among
them.
She knew that the wolves of a pack far from their den
didn’t just stare off into the distance for no reason. When
wolves were far from home they acted with purpose. They ran
with purpose, tracked with purpose. And now they waited with
purpose.
They seemed to be watching for something in particular to
happen, but Willa didn’t know what it was.
Then she saw an old black bear trundling down the slope
of the nearby hill.
All the wolves in the pack turned their heads in unison
and looked at the bear.
This was what they had come for.
But they did not move.
They did not attack.
They waited and they watched.
The bear moved slowly, arduously, as if every step was
painful to it as it made its way down the slope into the
closest valley. It seemed gout-sick or wounded in some way.
Were the wolves going to attack and kill the wounded
bear? she wondered, for the wolf and the bear were natural
enemies.
But the wolves did not move forward. They stayed
perfectly silent and perfectly still, watching the bear until
it disappeared into the mist of the valley.
Luthien seemed to take note of exactly where the bear had
gone out of sight. Then she looked at the other wolves in the
pack and moved in that direction. Clearly understanding her,
the other wolves slunk in close behind and followed her in
single file.
As Willa glanced back, she could see that the two male
wolves stayed closest to Luthien, right with her, strong and
steady, their bodies hunched low, their muscles tight, and
their eyes alert. The two pale-gazed young pups were slinking
along behind them, wary and uncertain, one of them visibly
shaking, his tail between his legs.
Willa did not know what kind of danger they were all
going into, but she could feel her body responding to theirs,
the hair on her arms rising up, her ears tingling, her
temples pounding.
The wolves followed the trail of the sick bear into the
white wall of thick fog and down into the valley. The colors
of the forest faded into gray.
As the rocks and trees around them disappeared in the
mist, Willa felt Luthien’s muscles tensing, ready for the
fight.
A s the long, single file line of wolves moved through the
fog, Willa couldn’t see anything but white ahead, on either
side, or behind her. She couldn’t hold back the pang of
fear. Where were the wolves taking her?
She held on to Luthien’s neck as the wolf lowered her
nose to the ground and followed the large tracks of the
wounded bear.
 Years before, when her mamaw could still walk, Willa
remembered crouching down in the undergrowth of the forest
with her twin sister, Alliw, the two of them watching their
mamaw’s wrinkled fingers tracing reverently over the tracks
on the ground—the deer with their cloven hooves, the
mountain lions and wolves with their four claws, and the
massive bear tracks with five distinct claws on each foot.
Where the earth was soft, the prints were easy to see.
But where the bear had crossed over rocky ground, the tracks
faded and then disappeared. But Luthien kept her nose to the
ground and followed the bear’s scent. No animal in the
forest other than the bear itself had a better sense of smell
than the wolf.
A whirring, whistling noise passed overhead. Willa looked
up, trying to figure out what it was, but the fog was too
thick to see anything.
She glanced behind her and saw the two young pups looking
timidly up into the fog; they didn’t know what it was
either.
When Luthien stopped, the other wolves gathered around
her, the leader of the pack. And as the mist cleared, they
all looked out in the same direction.
Willa lifted her eyes. She gazed in awe across a flat,
silver-shimmering body of water, a vast lake that extended
for as far as she could see before disappearing into the
mist.
Water poured down from natural springs in the surrounding
rocks, but the surface of the lake stayed perfectly smooth.
As great flocks of mergansers, teals, and other ducks wheeled
overhead, their whirling reflections were like dark, winged
fish swimming in the smooth water below.
Willa looked at the serene water of the lake in
astonishment. She had lived her whole life in a world of
whispering streams, gushing rivers, and tumbling waterfalls—
a place where water wasalways moving—but this flat,
motionless lake was an amazement she had never seen before.
 Noticing a dark shape moving down the slope, she turned
to see the old, sickened bear making its way toward the sandy
shore of the lake. The bear lumbered into the water, and then
sunk its body down into it, grunting air through its nose in
sounds of immense relief. The water seemed to soothe the pain
of its aching body.
Willa looked along the edge of the lake. There were other
bears, too, many of them brown or black, but others cinnamon
or blue-gray, all up and down the shore, some of them
swimming or wallowing in the water, others just sitting in
the wet sand at the water’s edge.
Luthien jolted in surprise when a massive white bear rose
up in front of her roaring in anger. Willa pulled in a
startled breath and clung tightly to Luthien’s back,
pressing her face into the thick fur of the wolf’s neck. But
instead of pulling back at the sight of the gigantic bear,
Luthien leapt forward with her teeth snapping in a savage
growl. The vibration of the wolf’s growl vibrated through
Willa’s body. She pressed herself to Luthien as the bear
stood on its hind legs and roared, outraged that the wolves
had dared to come to this sacred place. The other wolves of
the pack pulled back, and the whimpering pups scattered, but
Luthien held her ground.
Willa could see that this bear was much larger and much
older than any of the other bears. This washis lake, and he
was going to protect it from intruders like these wolves. A
single swipe of his enormous paw would easily kill a wolf or
a Faeran girl.
But then to her surprise, she realized that the bear
wasn’t just looking at Luthien. He was looking at her .
Her skin and hair had reflexively blended into the color
and texture of the wolf’s fur. In all appearance, she had
become part of the wolf.
But the bear appeared to be able to smell her, and its
dark eyes gazed in her direction. There was an uncertainty in
the bear’s expression, as if he thought he might know what
she was, but he hadn’t seen her kind in a long, long time.
As the white bear slowly stopped snarling, Luthien did
the same.
The bear peered at Willa. She wanted to look away, to
avert her eyes. She wanted to run away. But she held the
bear’s gaze.
Finally, the white bear dropped down onto all fours with
a muffled grunt, and Willa let out a breath of relief.
“Thank you,” she said in the old language, loud enough
for the bear to hear. “My name is Willa. My grandmother told
me about your strength and your wisdom. I am honored to meet
you.”
The white bear made a low guttural sound and turned his
bead and his body toward the lake.
“He’s letting us through,” Willa whispered to Luthien.
As Luthien stepped slowly toward the water, the other
wolves stayed where they were, even the two males who served
as her guards. They seemed to understand that only Willa and
Luthien were allowed to pass, and pressing the issue further
would result in a battle that neither the wolves nor the
bears wanted to fight.
As Willa and Luthien moved cautiously past the white
bear, she could see that he was extremely old. He didn’t
appear weak or decrepit, but she could see the knowingness in
his eyes and the gray streaks of time in his weathered face.
She sensed that he had been living far longer than any Faeran
or animal she had ever met.
For many years, her mamaw had taken her and her sister
Alliw through the cathedrals of the giant hemlocks, teaching
them how to speak with trees more than five hundred years
old. Willa knew that bears normally didn’t live as long as
Faeran, but she had a feeling that this particular bear had
been a cub when those age-old trees had been saplings.
As Luthien took her down to the edge of the water, goose
bumps rose on Willa’s arms. She knew it was going to be
cold. Every mountain stream she had ever entered had been
shockingly, bracingly frigid, like melted snow.
But as Luthien lowered her slowly into the lake, Willa
realized the water was warm and soothing. It felt as if the
light of the sun had become liquid.
As she leaned back into the water with only her face
above the surface, her body felt weightless, her arms rising
buoyant at her side, her hair floating around her head.
She sighed in relief as slow, gentle waves rippled one
after another through her body, lifting the pain away. She
felt the torn skin of her wounds slowly coming back together,
as if a month of healing had occurred in a few moments.
Her grandmother had told her and Alliw of a hidden lake
that the Cherokee calledAtagahi and a great white bear who
protected it. From a distance, the lake looked like nothing
more than one of the many mist-filled valleys, but hidden
below the clouds was a powerful healing place where sick and
wounded bears came for refuge. The great white bear
encouraged his ursine kin to come to the sacred lake, but
guarded it fiercely from all others.
As Willa floated in the water, letting its healing powers
move through her aching wounds, the white bear suddenly rose
up onto his hind legs in alarm and looked toward the rim of
the valley.
The quills on the back of Willa’s neck went taut as she
quickly got her legs beneath her and crouched down in the
water.
She couldn’t believe it. It was the man who had shot
her! He was standing on the rocky ridge, holding his killing-
stick as he stared out across the mist-filled valley. His dog
stood at his side. It was clear that they had followed her
here and they were still looking for her.
Luthien had carried her a great distance up through
steep, rocky terrain that must have been exceedingly
difficult for the man to climb. He must have run as fast as
he could to chase her. What storm of dark anger and hatred
had driven him to follow her so far?
Luthien stepped forward, growling and snarling, her
shoulders bunched for the attack. The wolves of the pack
maneuvered for battle. The white bear moaned a low and
menacing growl, his teeth clacking as the other bears
gathered to his side, ready to fight.
“Don’t see us,” Willa whispered as she gazed up at the
man, her heart filling with dread, not just of the human and
his dog, but of what would happen if they came down into the
valley. “Don’t see us,” she said again.
She knew that if the man saw the wolves and bears, he’d
become frightened, shooting his killing-stick this way and
that, and they’d attack in return. The man and the dog, and
many of the wolves and the bears, would die.
No day-folk man or woman had ever seen the healing lake
of the bears. They might have heard about it from the stories
of the Cherokee. They might have even searched for it. But
none of them had ever lived to tell about it.
“Just turn away,” Willa whispered as she gazed up
through the fog toward the man. “Whoever you are, whatever
you want with me, for your own sake, please just turn away.”
W hen the man finally turned and headed in a different
direction, Willa thought, Yes, go. Take your killing-stick
and your hatred away from here.
Luthien’s hackles lowered, and Willa sunk back down into
the water.
The bears, too, returned to their wallowing in the nearby
shallows as the white bear watched over them.
 She liked how the white bear was older and stronger than
the other bears, but he was serving them, helping them,
protecting them. Her mamaw had told her stories about how it
had once been the same with the Faeran, that all the members
of the clan would work together, protect each other, take
care of each other.
When the lake had finally stopped the bleeding and
soothed the pain of her wounds, Willa climbed back up onto
Luthien’s back.
“I wish I could stay here,” Willa said in the old
language, “but I need to get back to my clan. They’re going
to be looking for me.”
Willa noticed the white bear watching her as Luthien
carried her out of the water and up onto the shore. She knew
that this bear had seen so many things with those eyes—the
time of the first Cherokee long ago with their skin-piercing
blow darts and their spear-slinging atlatls, then the
homesteaders hacking their way through the wilderness with
their sharpened blades and their killing-sticks, and now the
newcomers with their smoking metal beasts. As the white bear
looked at her, he seemed to be thinking, And you see it, too,
don’t you, little one? You understand.
As Luthien and Willa rejoined the pack, the wolves
circled around them in greeting, and then they all headed off
together, with Luthien leading the way.
They traveled for several hours, up into the dark realms
of the Great Mountain, following secluded ravines along
rivers that washed the stones bone gray, and up through
chutes of ancient rock where once the water flowed.
Willa and the wolves came to a gorge where a gigantic
skeleton of a dead tree hung upside down, wedged between two
rock faces where a rushing flood had deposited it years
before. Its roots reached up into the air and its branches
hung down to the earth. The water had receded long ago, but
the bare gray trunk and limbs of the tree remained. Her
people called it the Watcher, for it loomed over the winding
path that led up through the rocky gorge to the entrance of
the Dead Hollow lair.
When Luthien came to a stop, Willa climbed reluctantly
off the wolf’s back.
Glancing up into the gorge in the direction of her
clan’s lair, Willa felt sick to her stomach. She didn’t
want to return to her clan. She wanted to go back to the lake
of the bears. She wanted to stay with the wolves. She wanted
to do anything other than return. But she knew she couldn’t.
A Faeran could only survive through her clan. The padaran had
I we
told them many times, “There is no . There is only .”
She belonged to her clan. And more than anything, she had to
get back to her grandmother. Her mamaw needed her and she
needed her mamaw. There is no I, only we.
As the wolves of the pack gathered around her to say
good-bye, she knelt down in front of Luthien.
Willa knew that to be touched by a wolf was a privilege,
but to actually be carried by a wolf like Luthien was a great
honor. Luthien had saved her life, and risked her own life to
do it.
Willa wrapped her arms around Luthien’s neck and hugged
her, feeling the thickness of the wolf’s fur against her
cheek.
When Luthien nuzzled up against her, Willa knew the wolf
understood. Willa felt a loyalty toward her that she vowed to
remember.
“I will never forget what you’ve done for me,
Luthien,” Willa said in the old language. “May your pack
run strong.”
In the moments that followed, she watched Luthien and the
other wolves turn and slowly disappear into the forest.
When they were finally gone, she felt a lurch of
loneliness in her chest. She didn’t want to be left behind.
She wanted to cry out to them, to raise her head up and howl
for them to come back for her.
 As she turned and looked toward the path that would take
her back to Dead Hollow, the lair of the clan into which she
had been born, she felt a lump of dark fear growing like
black roots in the pit of her stomach.
B efore she went home, there was one more thing she had to do.
When the jaetters went out thieving each night, they
usually went out in small groups to keep an eye on one
another, a rule the padaran had established long before she
was born. Nothing in the clan was ever done alone. But more
and more, she’d been sneaking out by herself, and the other
jaetters didn’t like it. They often lay in wait for her
return.
 She looked around at the surrounding forest to make sure
she was alone, then went over to the Watcher, the tree wedged
upside down in the gorge. She grabbed on to the lowest
branches and started climbing, wincing from the pain in her
shoulder. She knew that the movement of climbing might tear
open the wound that the lake had soothed and begun to heal,
but she had no choice.
She scaled the branches hand over hand, following the
tree all the way up until she came to a large, oblong hole
that had been dug into the trunk. Looking down inside the
cavity, she saw the tiny, sharply angled faces of five baby
pileated woodpeckers looking up at her.
“How are you this morning, my little ones?” she
whispered.
But it was a careless mistake. As soon as she said hello,
all the babies started squawking and cackling, excited to see
her.
“Shh, shh, shh,” she whispered. “Just soft now, don’t
give me away. I need you to hold on to something for me.”
But as she pulled the satchel off her shoulder, the
mother woodpecker came flying in with a burst of black and
white feathers and clung to the trunk of the tree with her
powerful claws. Willa was startled to see that something had
happened to her since she saw her last. The area around her
left eye was bleeding and her wing was badly bent, crumpled
close to her body. It was a wonder that she could fly at all.
“Come here…” Willa said, clinging to the tree with her
legs as she reached out and took the crow-sized bird into her
hands. “Let me look at you.”
The woodpecker knew she was trying to help her and did
not fight her or try to fly away. A tangle of fibrous twine
had wrapped tightly around the wing and body of the bird,
biting cruelly into her skin and binding her movement. But as
Willa investigated more closely, she could see that it
wasn’t just bits of string, it was pieces of a net of some
kind.
 “Oh my, who did this to you?” Willa said as she
carefully unwrapped the bird’s wing from the twisted
fragments. It would have taken days to kill her, but the
woodpecker would not have survived this, nor would her
starving babies. “You must have fought very hard to get out
of this net!” Willa said, the woodpecker watching her with
its rapidly blinking eyes as she worked. “There you go,
you’re all clear now. I hope you feel better.” The
woodpecker bobbed its head, then tended to her babies.
Why would someone be using a net in the forest? Willa
wondered. Is this some kind of cruel new weapon or trap the
day-folk are using?
Knowing that she needed to get back to what she’d come
for, Willa scanned the area below her one last time to make
sure no one was watching. Then she stuffed her satchel into
the cavity with the baby woodpeckers, careful not to block
them or hurt them in any way.
“I know it’s crowded in there,” she told the little
ones, “but I’ll be back for it very soon. Don’t worry.”
Hiding valuables in trees was a trick she and her sister
had learned from playing games with the ravens years before,
but Willa was pleased with her cleverness. Even the mighty
ravens wouldn’t think of using an occupied woodpecker hole
as a hiding spot.
What she was bringing back to the lair in her satchel was
a good take, something she should be proud of, but she knew
she was too tired to defend it from Gredic and her other
jaetter rivals.
As she climbed down the tree, and the sunlight peaked
into the gorge, her gut tightened with worry. If the sun was
already in the ravine, that meant it was late in the morning.
The padaran was going to be angry that she’d been gone all
night and that she wasn’t at the morning gathering. The
other jaetters would come looking for her, sensing her
weakness. She had to get back to the lair as soon as she
could.
 “What are you doing?” came a hissing voice from behind
her, as soon as she stepped foot on the ground.
The quills on the back of Willa’s neck went straight up
as she spun around to defend herself.
Four jaetters surrounded her with their long sticks.
“Don’t try to get away, Willa,” Gredic hissed in the
Eng-lish words, the only language he knew, as he shoved her
hard up against the rocky wall of the ravine.
Years before, she and Gredic had been initiated into the
jaetters at the same time, but he was a year older than her,
and at least six inches taller than her now, with clawed,
grasping fingers, and slimy, mottled gray skin. Like most of
the Faeran of her clan, Gredic’s skin didn’t change color
to match his surroundings. Blending—or weaving , as her mamaw
called it—was a fading remnant of the past that had been
dying out of the clan. Her mother, father, sister, and mamaw
had it. And she had it. It ran strong in families. But few of
the other Faeran had the ability. And the young jaetters of
her clan never let her forget how different she was from the
rest of them.
“Look at her, she’s going all stony brown!” Gredic’s
twin brother chided her as he pushed her head against the
stone. “Let’s make her face change color, too!”
His name was Ciderg, and he was the largest and most
brutal of the jaetters. The crooked nose and crushed
cheekbones of Ciderg’s mangled face were remnants of the
savage fight the year before that defeated his brother’s
rival and put Gredic in charge of the jaetters.
But it was the nasty Kearnin and his brother, Ninraek,
who scared Willa the most. “I think you’re frightening
her…” Kearnin rasped in snarling, fidgeting pleasure from
behind the other two jaetters as he wiped his nose with the
back of his gnarled hand. Kearnin and his brother were
sniveling creatures with black, needy eyes that oozed a
sticky, sap-like substance. Fascinated with everything Gredic
did, they liked to watch, whether he was pulling the wings
off a sparrow or pinning Willa against a rock and making her
twist in pain.
Willa squirmed and tried to yank away, but Gredic gripped
her arms with his clenching hands. It had always frustrated
her that he was so much stronger than her.
“Where’s your satchel, Willa?” he hissed, leaning his
face so close to her that his foul-smelling breath crept into
her nose like leeches.
“Yes, yes, where’s your satchel?” Kearnin rasped from
behind him, always repeating Gredic’s words.
“Are you scared, Willa?” Gredic whispered into her
face. “Can you feel your heart beating and your blood
pumping?”
“Let’s take her blood!” Kearnin shrieked.
“She’s already bleeding!” Ciderg said, jabbing his
stick at the wound on her back, as his brother held her.
Gredic wrenched her around by the arm and looked at her.
“You’re hurt…” he said in surprise, his eyes narrowing at
her suspiciously.
“The little beastie is hurt…” Kearnin hissed.
When Gredic dug his probing fingers into the bloody
wound, it sent sharp bolts of pain roiling through her back.
She tried to squirm away from him, but he gripped her arm
even tighter and shook her. “Where did you go, Willa? Tell
me!”
“Leave me alone,” she said, as she tried to pull away
from him.
But he held her tight and his voice went quiet as he
pushed against her. “What did you do, Willa?” he whispered.
“What are you hiding?”
Gredic was far smarter than the other jaetters, and she
could hear the fear seeping into his voice. He often used his
anger as his power, shouting at her and the other jaetters to
get what he wanted. But just as often, he was kind to her,
almost gentle with her when he felt sorry for her, or was
helping her—when his power was secure. But his kindness
vanished when he thought she was slipping away from him in
some way, or getting an edge on him. He knew that this wound
from a different place meant that wherever she had gone that
night, whatever she had done, she had done it without him.
And this he would not allow.
She and Gredic had gone through the starving nights and
beating blows of the jaetter initiation together, and in the
years since, when the jaetters went out thieving, he had made
sure the two of them were in the same group.There is no I,
only we.
Gredic yanked her around to face him again and pressed
her back against the wall with a harsh shove.
“Tell me what you did!” he demanded again, crushing her
with his weight as he slipped his long, bony hands tightly
around her neck.
S he struggled against him, but Willa knew she couldn’t fight
Gredic. She couldn’t overpower him. She couldn’t strike him
with a blow to defeat him. He was far too strong. And with
his brutish brother, Ciderg, and the nasty Kearnin, and all
the other jaetters who followed him, he had far too many
allies.
As he pressed her up against the rock wall, the jagged
edges of the stone jammed into her shoulder blades, driving a
slash of pain into her wound. He pushed against her so hard
that she could barely expand her chest enough to take a
breath. But as the grip of Gredic’s fingers slowly squeezed
her throat shut, she pushed out a few last words.
“Let me speak, Gredic…” she wheezed.
Gredic leaned his face close to hers and looked into her
eyes. “I’m warning you: no tricks, Willa. Don’t try to
run!”
“I will not run,” she said, her voice thin and raspy
through the grip of his fingers.
“Swear it!” he demanded.
“I swear that I will not run,” she said.
Finally, Gredic loosened his grip on her throat and
stepped back away from her.
“Now, tell me what happened to you last night. Where’s
your satchel?”
At that moment, Willa blended herself into the color and
texture of the lichen that clung to the rock. She wove
herself so completely into the world around her that she
disappeared. Her skin, her eyes, her hair…she vanished.
Although they’d seen her do it before, the Faeran boys
gasped, as much in anger as in surprise. Gredic immediately
reached out to grab her again, but she had already dropped to
the ground and curled into a little ball at the base of the
rock.
“Where’d she go?” Ciderg shouted, sweeping his stick
back and forth through the open air where he’d seen her
last.
“She’s tricked us!” Kearnin shrieked.
“Just find her!” Gredic screamed in frustration, as he
searched the ground around him.
Willa had promised she wouldn’t run.
And she didn’t.
She crawled slowly and invisibly away from the jaetter
boys.
 They searched frantically for her, flailing their arms
around them and poking with their sticks. They stabbed into
the ground and jabbed into trees. They rustled bushes and
kicked up dirt, but their efforts were useless. They
couldn’t find her.
Finally, Gredic said, “Come on. She’ll have to come
back to the lair sooner or later, and we’ll catch her
then.”
“We’ll catch her then,” Kearnin repeated, dragging his
hand across his nose as they headed off.
“The padaran’s gonna be burnin’ that she didn’t come
home last night,” Ciderg said, seeming to relish the
thought. “There’s no slinkin’ away from that.”
“Maybe not,” Gredic said. “But whatever we do, we need
to get her satchel before she sees the padaran. She must have
something good to be doing all this.”
As the jaetter boys climbed up through the rocky gorge,
following the path that led beneath the Watcher hanging
between its stony walls, they finally disappeared into the
distance, but she knew she hadn’t seen the last of them.
They’d be waiting, ready to filch her satchel and drag her
empty-handed before the padaran in shame.
Her mamaw had told her that many of the jaetters had no
parents or grandparents to raise them, and that they had lost
their way. And just as with the humans, that which the
jaetters did not understand, they destroyed. And that meant
her.
When she was certain the jaetters were well gone, and she
thought it was safe for her to come out of her hiding place,
she climbed back up the giant tree and retrieved her satchel
from the woodpecker’s hole. She knew it was dangerous to
carry it, but she realized now, more than ever, that she was
going to need it as soon as she returned to Dead Hollow.
Just as she began to start her climb down, she heard
voices below her. She gazed from her bird’s-eye view down
into the gorge to see a band of the padaran’s guards winding
along the path and going out into the forest. They were
moving quickly and with purpose, carrying their spears as
well as other equipment she couldn’t make out. She’d never
seen anything like it. The guards seemed to be in some sort
of hunting party, but Faeran didn’t hunt the animals of the
forest.
She knew she couldn’t take the main path into the lair,
so when she finally climbed down she took one of the side
routes, then split off on her own through the steep and rocky
forest.
She climbed up and over a thicket-strangled ridge, her
arm and shoulder hurting all the way. The healing lake of the
bears had stopped the bleeding and saved her life, but the
jabbing sticks and probing fingers of the jaetter boys had
reopened the wound. She could feel the sticky blood oozing
down her back.
Finally, she could see the lair of her people. From a
distance, the part of the Dead Hollow lair that was visible
on the surface of the earth looked like a vast hornet’s
nest, with the same rough, gray-brown, irregular shape, but
instead of being made from the hornet’s sticky paper, the
walls of the lair were made from a mesh of thousands of
interwoven sticks. The walls had once been green and alive,
woven together and sustained in life by the woodwitches of
the Faeran past. They had used the same powerful woodcraft
her mamaw had taught her, the same language she used to ask
the trees to help her cross the river or intertwine around
her when she needed to disappear. But the lair’s walls were
long dead now—dead for more than a hundred years, her mamaw
said—the sticks twisted and rotting, blackened by age, their
roots decayed, for the woodcraft needed to keep the walls
alive had long faded from the ways of the Faeran. There just
weren’t enough woodwitches to keep the lair green and alive
anymore. The very name woodwitch had become a title of scorn,
even fear, to many in the clan, and the padaran had forbidden
the old ways.
 Willa climbed down into the gorge on the backside of the
lair where few Faeran ever crept. She found the spot that her
mamaw had told her about, where three large rocks had crashed
down from the wall of the ravine and left a small triangular
hole that looked like nothing more than a crack in the stone.
Getting down onto her hands and knees, she crawled
inside. The crack became so tight that she had to get down
onto her shoulder and wiggle her way along like a centipede.
When she finally reached the other side, she crawled out
of the stone crack and found herself hunched in a small room
enclosed with walls of twisting, wet, rotting sticks. She
wrinkled her mouth in revulsion at the dank stench of
decaying branches that filled the air. Putrid sludge dripped
from the ceiling.
This area of the lair had been abandoned for decades, and
had been strictly forbidden by the padaran, too dangerous for
members of the clan to enter.
Anxious to get out of this wretched part of the lair, she
followed a narrow tunnel. It turned, and then turned again,
until she came to a split that led off into several different
directions. She picked the one that led upward, and kept
moving. She had to get home to her mamaw.
The inside of the Dead Hollow lair consisted of a maze of
woven-stick tunnels, black and sticky from years of use, that
wound through the gullet of the gorge into the small,
darkened rooms and secluded caves of her people. It had once
been home to many thousands of Faeran, but now only a few
hundred remained, and there were many dark and empty places
like this one left behind, old storage areas and dens where
Faeran once lived, filled with nothing but the echoes of
those who had come before. The tunnels of the lair connected
one to the other like wormholes twisting and writhing through
the earth.
As Willa tried to navigate her way back home, the wound
on her shoulder began to throb. A wave of dizziness passed
through her, and she nearly toppled to the floor. She
clutched the wall to catch her balance and rest. When she
touched her hand to the wound on her back, her fingers came
back bright and slippery with fresh blood. Thanks to the
healing lake of the bears, she felt a dull ache rather than a
sharp pain, but her wound was bleeding again. If she
couldn’t find her way through these old tunnels, she was
going to die here and no one would ever know. She had to
continue on.
She came to a place where the tunnel split into three
different directions, and she wasn’t sure which way to go.
She sniffed the air of each tunnel. In the tunnel on the
left, she thought she could smell the distant scents of her
clan. She hoped it led upward toward the more active parts of
the lair. But then she heard a disturbing whimpering sound
coming from the tunnel that led down to the right.
She stopped and stayed quiet as she tried to identify the
sound. It wasn’t the wind howling wraithlike through the
empty tunnels like it sometimes did. It sounded more like a
wounded animal.
When she heard the sound again, fear seeped into her
body. She wiped her dry lips with the back of her hand. There
was something down that tunnel. She could smell it.
She wanted to go in the opposite direction. She wanted to
get home. Shehad to get home. But the sound…
It wasn’t a whimpering animal.
She heard it again.
It was a voice.
She took a few uncertain steps into the tunnel and cupped
her hands behind her ears to focus the sound.
She heard something dragging across the woven-stick
floor.
Then she heard something breathing.
Her chest began to rise and fall more heavily, pulling
air into her lungs.
She tilted her head and sniffed. The smell was oddly
familiar.
 But it did not belong here.
Not here.
Her palms began to sweat.
It was the smell of a human
.
How is that possible? she thought in confusion. That
can’t be.
She took a few more steps down the tunnel toward the
noises she had heard. There were woven-stick doors on each
side, with thorny vines binding them shut so that whatever
was inside could not get out.
As she peered through the lattice of sticks, she realized
that there wasn’t an actual room on the other side of each
door, but a small enclosure, some sort of prison cell.
Then she saw. Crammed into the hole—closed in by
impenetrable, woven-stick walls—was a small Cherokee boy,
about ten years old, staring out at her with wide, pleading
eyes.
This human boy should not be here, Willa thought. The Faeran
people did not attack humans. They did not capture humans and
hold them prisoner.
She wanted to turn away from this. She wanted to run. She
wasn’t supposed to be here. This was the forbidden part of
the lair. If the padaran’s guards caught her here, she’d be
in even worse trouble than she already was. And the wound on
her back ached. Her arms and legs and her whole body felt
weak and clammy from the loss of blood.
But she stayed perfectly still for several seconds, just
trying to breathe, trying to understand, as the Cherokee
boy’s dark brown eyes stared out at her.
Why is there a human here? she thought. What are they
doing with it?
She could see its little brown hands clinging to the door
of sticks that imprisoned it. And as she peered deeper into
its hole, she saw that it was thin and dirty and bleeding.
She felt the stab of a strange and unpleasant emotion
twisting in her gut, but she quickly hardened her mind. If it
had been an animal or a Faeran in this cell, she would have
been right to feel sorry for it, but it wasn’t. It was a
human. Enemy of the clan. Murderer of her people. It wasn’t
a him. It was an it. And she was forbidden to have anything
to do with it.
“Can you help me?” it whispered in a weak and desperate
voice, wiping the long black hair from its face.
She stepped back, startled. She knew that the Cherokee
spoke the Eng-lish words as well as their own, but the sound
of its voice frightened her. She could hear the weakness, the
fear, the starvation of it. She could hear it all. And she
didn’t want to hear it.
“Do you have food?” it asked.
The creature is starving, she thought in revulsion. It
was as if someone had captured a wild bobcat and put it in a
cage. No matter what you did with the bobcat, it was still a
bobcat. It needed meat to survive.
Out in the world, down in the valleys of the day-folk,
where she made her nightly takes, it would never even occur
to her to help a human boy, to actually feed one. They were
tree-killers. How could she help such a beastly little
creature?
She could not give this boy food. She didn’t have any
human food to give it. She had never seen or heard of her
people taking prisoners, but the padaran and his guards must
have captured this human and put it here for a reason,
something important to the clan. It would be an act of great
disobedience to feed it without permission.
She knew all this! And she had no food. It was
impossible.
“I’ll eat anything,” the boy begged her. “I’m just
so hungry. Please!”
“Shut your mouth,” she ordered it, her mind darting
from one thought to another, trying to make sense of what was
happening.
And then she remembered.
There was something in her satchel.
She looked down the corridor, first one way and then the
other.
This must be some sort of prison, she thought,hidden
down here in the old part of the lair. But if it’s a prison,
there must be guards…
She thought the guards might come down the corridor at
any moment and find her here. And they’d punish her for her
disobedience against the clan. They’d lock her in one of
these slimy holes and bind the door shut like they had with
the boy. She could not help this boy! It was impossible. Get
what you came for, Willa, she told herself angrily.Get
yourself home.
But it was no use. She knelt down on the floor.
“You must stay quiet!” she told the boy as she opened
her satchel.
Watching her hands, the boy nodded obediently.
As its little fingers grasped the sticks that imprisoned
it, she could see the brown under the fingernails where it
had tried to scratch its way out. She could smell the sweat
of its body and the blood of its wounds.
She reached into her satchel and pulled out one of the
lumps she had stolen from the lair of the man. She pushed the
crumbly food through the lattice of sticks that separated her
from the boy.
The boy took the lump gratefully and shoved it in its
mouth.
She fed it another lump, and it ate the lump even more
quickly than the first one, for it had learned to trust her,
to take whatever she gave it.
“These are so good, thank you,” it said as it chomped
the next lump down.
“Do not speak to me,” she said fiercely, her face
flaring with red as she suddenly remembered what a foolish
thing she was doing.
The startled boy pulled back into its cell. “Why am I
here?” he asked. “Why have you taken me?”
Willa’s eyes widened in surprise.
“I haven’t taken you!” she said.
And as soon as she said the words, she felt so out of
place, so disobedient, to be defiantly separating herself
There is no I, only we.
from the clan in this way. There was
theclan us
. There was the them
and the I I
. There was no .
I I
was a person alone. was an impossibility. was something
that shriveled alone and died. Only through the cooperation
of the clan did a Faeran survive.
But she had said it, and she had said it strong. “I
haven’t taken you,” she had said.
She knew she was part of the clan, but she wanted nothing
to do with this. You run from humans. You hide from them. You
steal from them. But you don’t hurt them. You don’t do this
to them.
“If you’re not one of them, then who are you?” the boy
asked.
The question struck her mind like a blow. Who are you? It
was the second time a human had asked her that question.
“My name is Willa,” she said, unsure why she was
allowing herself to talk to the human at all.
 The Cherokee boy pressed its face against the lattice of
sticks that formed the little window in the door. And now she
could see it studying her, looking at the dirt on her arms
and legs, and the smears of dried blood on her face.
“You look like you might be pretty hungry, too,” it
said. “You should eat some of the cookies.”
“You eat them,” she said, pushing the last two through
the sticks at it. “I will have food soon enough when I get
back home.”
“Thank you,” it said as it gratefully ate the last two
lumps. “My name’s Iska. What’s going to happen to me? Why
am I here? Please help m—”
The sound of approaching footsteps interrupted the boy’s
words. Willa jumped to her feet. The prison guards were
coming.
T he two guards spotted her in front of the boy’s cell as
they came around the corner. They were tall, gangly Faeran
with grim, grayish faces, muscled arms and chests, and
sharpened wooden spears.
“What are you doing down here?” one shouted at Willa.
“Stop there!”
To disobey the commands of one of the padaran’s guards
was a great offense against the clan, but she was a rabbit
under the claws of a swooping hawk. She fled, tearing down
the corridor in the only direction she could go, deeper into
the prison, every muscle in her body snapping with fear, her
lungs sucking in air at a frantic pace.
The outraged guards chased after her, determined to catch
her, to stab her with their spears. They’d drag her in shame
before the padaran for her disobedience, or shove her into
one of their black cells.
As she whipped around a corner, she heard the footfalls
of the guards behind her, felt the vibration of their
pounding, running steps on the woven-stick floor.
She threw herself against the wall and pinned herself
flat. Her whole body buzzing, she closed her eyes and tried
to blend into the wall.
Stay still, she told herself as she forced her heart to a
slow and steady beat.Just stay still.
I am the wall, I am the wall, she repeated in her mind,
and prayed that it would be enough.
As she quieted her heart and held her breath, the guards
ran past her, one brushing by her so close that she felt the
movement of the air on her cheek.
“What was that girl doing down here?” one of the guards
asked the other as they ran by, his voice so loud in her
quiet mind that it felt like it could knock her from the
wall.
“Did you see her face?” the other asked.
“It looked like one of the jaetter girls.”
“We’ve got to tell the padaran.”
As the sound of the guards faded into the distance, Willa
pulled in a much-needed breath and stepped away from the
wall.
She immediately headed in the opposite direction from the
guards, anxious to get out of the prison. But as she made her
way up the corridor, she passed many cell doors and caught
glimpses of faces in the woven-stick walls. They were strange
white faces with blue eyes and brown eyes looking out at her
as she passed, their spidery white fingers clinging to the
sticks that bound them. Many more day-folk boys and girls had
been trapped in tiny, dark prison holes. The faces were dirty
with filth and gaunt with hunger. Some of them were bloody or
disfigured by wounds. Her stomach churned with tight,
twisting confusion as she pushed herself on.
She ran back up the tunnel in the direction she had come,
desperate to get out of the prison and find her way up to the
areas where she and the other members of the clan were
allowed to be. She should have never entered the forbidden
parts of the lair.
When she finally reached an active tunnel, her heart
filled with gratitude. Most of the tunnels of Dead Hollow
were empty and abandoned, but some were still used frequently
by those few Faeran who still remained.
She spotted two Faeran adults walking ahead of her, both
of them carrying bushels of leafy food gathered by the clan.
She tried to look like a normal member of the clan going
about her business, but it was difficult.
“Slow yourself down,” one said to Willa as she hurried
by with her head lowered.
Her mind kept trying to make sense of what she’d seen in
the prison behind her, but she knew she had to block it out.
It didn’t belong to her. It didn’t involve her. They were
prisoners of the clan. They were humans . They were the enemy.
Whatever was happening down there must be something the
padaran wanted to be happening. She wasn’t even supposed to
be down there. And she vowed she’d never go into that
horrible place again.
As she hurried through the tunnels of the lair, with
other Faeran passing her this way and that, she kept to
herself and she did not stop.
She longed to get home to her den, to her mamaw, just to
see her, to fall into her gentle arms and her soothing words,
to come back to the one person in the world who truly loved
her.
 But she knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. A heaviness
loomed in her chest, a dark sense of foreboding like she’d
never felt before. She’d done too much this time. She
hadn’t meant to, but she’d seen too much. She’d been so
disobedient in so many ways against the laws of the clan and
the will of the padaran that she had no idea what was going
to happen to her, except that it was going to be bad.
W hen Willa finally came to the tunnel that sloped down into
the area of the lair she shared with her grandmother, a warm
and gentle sense of relief poured through her body.
What she’d seen in the prison still haunted her, but the
immediacy of her fear and confusion began to fade as she
followed the familiar path home.
The walls on the way to her den weren’t woven sticks
like the rest of Dead Hollow, but a labyrinth of stone
tunnels that had been bored and sculpted smooth by the flow
of an ancient river.
Some of the tunnels led to small caves, others to dead
ends. One of the tunnels, which her mamaw had warned her
about many times, led to a drop-off into a black abyss. Some
members of the clan believed that the dark hole of the abyss
was the mouth of an ancient creature of the earth. Others
believed that it was a bottomless pit that went on forever.
She and her sister, Alliw, used to sneak away, crawl to the
edge, and peer down into the hole. One time they dropped a
rock into the darkness and waited. But they never heard it
hit the bottom. The truth was, no one truly knew what was
down there.
There were many pits and dangers in the labyrinth, but
Willa knew the maze of winding, interconnecting stone tunnels
better than anyone, because it was the only way to her den.
At long last, she came to the familiar tunnel close to
home where the roof was permeated with smooth, round holes.
River water had once poured through the holes, but now shafts
of sunlight came filtering down instead, dappling the stone
at her feet like rays of light shining through the leaves of
great trees and touching the forest floor. This part of the
labyrinth had once been inhabited by Faeran of old, and of
all the places in the lair, these were the tunnels where she
felt most at home.
The stone walls were covered with the charcoal drawings
and colored paintings of the people who had lived here
thousands of years before. On one wall were many sticklike
figures with their arms and legs outstretched, swimming in
rivers that were dry ravines now. Another wall showed crowds
of people looking up in awe at a blazing sun blocked by a
round shape, with stars and planets visible in the
background. On a third wall, there were Faeran men and women
and children standing among tall trees as they gazed upon
herds of large, horned animals that no longer existed in the
world.
 But the most striking painting of all depicted what
looked like a river that flowed along the length of one of
the tunnel walls, but instead of curving lines of water, the
River of Souls consisted of thousands of handprints, some
large, some small, some put there a thousand years before,
and others more recent.
“It’s good to see you, sister,” Willa whispered as she
leaned down and pressed her open hands onto the two smallest
and most recent pair of handprints on the wall. When she
closed her eyes, she had a perfect memory of when she and
Alliw were just five years old, her mamaw covering their
hands with red paint, one sister’s left hand and the other
sister’s right, and then, as if they had a single body,
pressing their hands side by side into the ancient river of
time.
“Never forget that you are forever among your people,”
her mamaw had told the two of them. “In the past, and in the
present, and in the future to come.”
The marks of her and Alliw’s hands still remained, so
small now compared to Willa’s living hands, like ghosts of
who she and her sister had been. But Willa knew that she and
Alliw were still together in their souls, for among the
Faeran, who were always born in twins, the relationship
between two twins was sacred. Twins always took care of each
other, protected each other. There was no more noble deed
than to support a twin, and no fouler crime than to forsake
one. It was the bond that could not be broken.
Whenever she came down this tunnel, it was like she was
walking into a different time, a time long, long ago when the
Faeran and the world were one, and true kinship held the clan
together.
Willa had lived here alone with her grandmother for as
long as she could remember clearly in her mind. Everything
else before was but a distant, clouded memory.
Her mother’s twin sister, who would have normally helped
raise her with her parents, had died of oak wilt before Willa
was born. Her father, Cillian, and her mother, Nea, were
slain by the day-folk when she was six. And the humans
murdered Alliw that same night.
She remembered her distraught, grief-stricken grandmother
stumbling into their den, taking her up into her arms, and
whispering in the old language. “Your sister and your
parents have passed away, my child,” she had said. “You and
I are all that’s left now, and we need to take care of each
other. You’ll be my twin and I’ll be yours.”
Willa didn’t know that night what those words meant,
what it meant for someone to “pass away,” and she didn’t
understand how her life would change, but she learned in the
shadowed days that followed. It felt like something had been
torn away from her, bleeding and raw. She kept looking for a
sister who wasn’t there. She kept trying to speak with a
mother and a father who could no longer hear her. The anguish
and loneliness she felt was one of her oldest and most
powerful memories. For the rest of her life she had felt a
dark hollowness in her soul, like something that should be
there was missing.
She couldn’t remember her parents very well anymore, and
she still didn’t understand how or where they had been
killed, but the fleeting fragments of her life with her twin
sister before she died haunted her like the sounds of
children playing in the distance.
But her mamaw—her mother’s mother—had been with her
all her life. Her mamaw had been her teacher in the days
before her parents and sister died, and her mamaw had cared
for her on her own every day since. She had taught her how to
speak, how to blend, and how to find her way among the trees.
As Willa walked through the doorway into the den, she
knew that no matter what happened, no matter how she felt, no
matter what she had done, she could count on one thing: that
her mamaw would be there waiting for her.
“C ome here, child,” her grandmother whispered softly in
the old language as Willa walked into their den. Her mamaw
was a small, crumpled-up creature, unable to stand or walk,
but Willa went to her immediately and wrapped her arms around
her, knowing that she wasn’t nearly as frail as she
appeared.
Her grandmother was 137 years old, one of the oldest
Faeran in the clan, and one of the last remaining old-time
woodwitches. She had the most beautiful dark skin, marbled
with streaks of brown, black, and white, and she was heavily
spotted around her cheeks and eyes. Her skin was wrinkled and
textured not just with age, but years of weaving into her
surroundings. The strands of her long, finely braided hair
were mostly black but intertwined with gray, brown, red, and
gold, as if she had inside her the essence of every person
who had ever lived.
“Where have you been all night?” her mamaw asked
gently, the edges of her voice frayed with love and relief
and admonishment all at the same time.
“I’m sorry, I was trying, but I couldn’t get home,
Mamaw,” Willa whispered in the old words as she held her.
She and her mamaw always spoke in the Faeran language
when they were alone within the smooth, curving stone walls
of their den, but they were careful to never speak it in
front of other members of the clan. The padaran had forbidden
the use of the old language decades before Willa was born,
insisting that everyone learn the ways of day-folk for the
survival of the lair. But Faeran was the first language Willa
had learned to speak from her parents and grandparents at
home. The Eng-lish words, and some of the Cherokee words,
that came to her ears later in her life had always been a
struggle for her, always twisting on her tongue, which had
made it even more difficult to fit in with the other
jaetters.
“You’re hurt,” her mamaw said as her small, trembling
hands passed over Willa’s body. “Lie down here…” she
whispered, patting the area beside her, and Willa immediately
complied, laying herself in the cocoon of soft woven river
cane that hung from the ceiling by vines.
When most of the members of the clan looked at her
grandmother they saw a decrepit old woman who couldn’t walk,
but Willa knew her grandmother had once been a distant
wayfarer of the mountains, a consummate weaver who could
disappear into any background in an instant, and a friend to
many of the most sacred animals of the forest. She carried
the lore of the forest inside her—in her old body, in her
mind, in her dreaming soul—and Willa had always been as
greedy for that knowledge as a sapling was for light.
When her grandmother told long and winding stories of the
past, the other members of the clan—especially the young
jaetters—turned away in boredom, or even scoffed at her, but
Willa wanted to hear her mamaw’s stories. She wanted to be
able to do what her mamaw had once done. She wanted to know
what her mamaw knew.
But as Willa grew from sapling into tree, becoming
stronger and stronger in her forest skills, her mamaw became
weaker and weaker, her body sinking down to the ground like
an old willow tree whose branches had become too weak for it
to carry.
Most of the members of the clan ate the food that the
foragers brought into the lair for them, but her mamaw had
always foraged for her own food. When her mamaw could no
longer go out into the forest and gather her own food, Willa
went out and gathered it for her. When her mamaw lost the use
of her legs, Willa made her a sling of woven reeds to keep
her upright. When her mamaw’s hands trembled, Willa steadied
them in her own.
“Tell me what happened to you,” her grandmother said as
she examined Willa’s wounds.
But Willa went quiet.
Her mamaw had told her many times how dangerous the day-
folk could be. “I know the padaran expects you to steal from
them,” her mamaw had told her when she was ten, “but when
you hear them coming, you must run. When you see them, you
must hide. They are not of this world, so promise me that you
will not go near them.”
The last thing Willa wanted to do now was to tell her
mamaw where she’d gone and what she’d done. She lay like an
injured fawn curled up quietly as her grandmother worked on
her wounds.
 Needing supplies, her mamaw used the strength of her arms
to drag herself over to a small niche in the stone wall where
light filtered down through round holes in the ceiling onto a
number of leafy plants and small trees that she had planted
there years before. She had been caring for the plants ever
since. As she approached them, the plants reached upward, not
just toward the light of the sun, but to her nurturing hands
and her murmuring voice, moving back and forth between her
open fingers as if the leaves were being caressed by a gentle
breeze.
One of the plants was a miniature tree growing out of a
small stone bowl. It had fine tendrils of roots growing into
the dirt, a bent little trunk, and a spread of delicate
branches above that were covered in tiny bright green leaves.
“Thank you, my friend,” her mamaw whispered as she
carefully picked a single leaf from the tree and brought it
over to Willa.
Willa had known this little tree all her life and had
spoken with it many times. It had always been one of her
closest friends. Her mamaw had told her that although it was
small, this tree was more than six hundred years old and, in
some ways, more powerful than the entirety of the lair above.
She said that she’d been protecting it, hiding it, keeping
it small, until one day it could come out into the light of
the world and grow up into what it was meant to be.
Her mamaw put the tiny leaf into her own mouth for a
moment, then brought it out again, crushed it between her
fingers, and began to apply it bit by bit to Willa’s wounds.
The pain of the wound immediately began to subside. The lake
of the bears had stanched the bleeding and saved her life,
but now her mamaw continued the healing process.
This one room, this little den where she had grown up
with her mamaw since her parents and sister died, was her
protected place, her home. It was the one place that the
outside world never came. It was the only place that she had
ever felt truly safe and the only place she had ever felt
truly loved.
But halfway through her work, her mamaw paused. Willa
heard the sigh of her breath as she exhaled.
Willa winced a little as her grandmother’s fingers pried
carefully into the wound and pulled out a tiny piece of metal
the size of a small pebble.
It was a piece of lead shot.
Her grandmother frowned.
“Willa,” she said. “You must help me understand this.
What am I seeing here? How were you hurt? Is there something
you’re not telling me?”
A s she drew in a breath to speak, a bout of shame filled
Willa’s chest. “I was shot by a homesteader, Mamaw,” she
said, her voice cracking as her lip trembled.
“Ah, child…” her mamaw said as she wrapped her arms
around her. “But how is it possible this wound is already
healing?”
“I asked the wolves for help,” Willa said.
 “The wolves…” her mamaw said, her voice filled with a
trace of respect.
“They took me to the lake of the bears.”
“I see,” her mamaw said, her eyebrows rising in
surprise. “And the bears allowed…”
“The white bear was there, Mamaw, just like you said he
was. He wasn’t pleased about the wolves, but he let me go
down to the lake.”
“The white bear saved your life…” her mamaw said.
“And the wolf did as well. Her name is Luthien. We’ve
become good friends.”
When Willa looked into her mamaw’s face, she could see
the pride sparkling in her eyes, but then her grandmother’s
expression turned far more serious.
“But there is still one thing I don’t understand,” her
grandmother said. “How did the man with the killing-stick
see you well enough in the forest to shoot you?”
Willa’s heart sank. This was one situation she couldn’t
blend her way out of.
“Don’t tell me you went near one of their lairs…” her
grandmother said, tilting her head and narrowing her eyes at
her.
Willa didn’t want to answer, but the reddened color of
her skin answered for her. There were times when color was a
curse.
“I went inside!” Willa blurted desperately. “I had
to!”
“I’ve told you before that it’s too dangerous!” her
grandmother scolded her. Willa could see her mamaw moving her
lips as she found the words. “You’re not you in there,”
she said finally. “The old powers do not work in the lairs
of the new ones. You know that!”
“I know I do,” Willa pleaded.
“Then why did you do it, Willa? Why?”
“I wanted to prove to the padaran what I could do, that
I could steal something good!”
 “Aw, child,” her grandmother said, shaking her head as
she put her hand gently on Willa’s arm. “The padaran
doesn’t deserve you.”
Willa frowned in confusion and looked at her. “But he’s
the padaran.”
“Yes, but don’t let him control what’s in here,” her
mamaw said, touching her fingers to Willa’s chest. “I know
you’re trying to be part of the clan. That’s good. It’s an
instinct of our people to stick together.”
“But what?” Willa pressed her. “What did I do wrong? I
don’t understand.”
“There are many dangers outside the lair,” her mamaw
said gravely, “but I’m afraid there are even more on the
inside.”
“What do you mean, Mamaw?” Willa asked. “I don’t
understand what’s going on.”
“The padaran is making changes in the lair,” her mamaw
said.
“I saw a band of guards leaving this morning,” Willa
said, “and I found a bird tangled in a net. Are the day-folk
using the nets or our own people doing it? They’re not
trying to actually hurt birds and animals, are they?”
“You know that it is not the Faeran way to hurt any of
the animals of the forest,” her mamaw said.
Finally working up her courage, Willa decided to tell her
grandmother everything she had seen. “On my way back home,
when I was down in one of the abandoned parts of the lair, I
saw human children in prison cells.”
Her grandmother stopped what she was doing and went very
still, as if she was trying to absorb what Willa had just
told her. “Human children…” her mamaw whispered, as if
even saying the words out loud might bring the padaran’s
guards rushing into the room.
“Why, Mamaw?” Willa asked. “Why are the guards
imprisoning those humans?”
 “I don’t know,” her mamaw said, “but I sense the
decisions of a desperate mind.”
Whose desperate mind? Willa wondered. “The padaran
wouldn’t order this, would he? The Faeran people don’t harm
day-folk. We don’t harm anyone.”
“Very little happens in Dead Hollow that the padaran
doesn’t control,” her mamaw said. “You must be very
careful, Willa, especially now. Too many of our people have
been dying. Sometimes even knowing something brings death.”
Willa was getting more and more frightened by her
mamaw’s words, and the tone of her voice. Knowing brings
death, Willa kept thinking.
“The clan is restless,” her mamaw warned.
“The foraging crews haven’t been collecting enough food
for everyone,” Willa said. “They’re angry and miserable. I
don’t understand why the padaran doesn’t let more people go
out into the forest and forage on their own.”
“It is said to be too dangerous,” her mamaw said.
“But is it truly too dangerous to even go out and forage
in the forest for food? I go out thieving every night, either
with the other jaetters or on my own. Didn’t all the Faeran
of old forage in the forest?”
“I’ve tried to teach you in the old ways, so that you
wouldn’t be beholden to anyone,” her mamaw said. “But most
of the members of our clan no longer have the skills to
survive in the forest.”
Willa remembered what had happened with her friend
Gillen, a fellow jaetter whom she often went out thieving
with. Gillen was one of the toughest jaetters she knew, fast
and strong. But one night Willa took Gillen out into the
forest with her to forage for food. Willa found some
blackberries and started eating them, but when she glanced
over to Gillen, she saw that the girl had picked up a
beautiful white mushroom instead. Willa leapt at her, pushed
her fingers into her mouth, and pulled the mushroom out by
force. “Spit it out! Spit it out!” she had screamed.
 The mushroom Gillen had chosen had been a Death Cap. A
single swallow would have killed her.
Willa looked at her mamaw. “Do you remember the time I
took Gillen out foraging with me?”
“Gillen doesn’t have a mother to teach her,” her mamaw
said.
“Or a grandmother,” Willa said, smiling at her mamaw.
“Or a grandmother,” her mamaw said, smiling in return.
“I taught Gillen how to tell the difference between the
good ones and the bad ones in that particular patch,” Willa
said. “But they were all growing in that same area and many
of them looked very similar.”
“There is much to teach, isn’t there?” her mamaw said
gently, and Willa had a feeling she wasn’t just talking
about Gillen.
Willa had been learning from her mamaw all her life, but
she knew there was still much for her to learn. Her
grandmother had always been careful to only teach her what
she thought she could truly understand and use wisely. “A
tree must grow to reach the sky,” she would often say.
Willa’s thoughts turned back to Gillen. Her friend lived
in a distant part of the lair, where many of the jaetters
slept huddled together in tight pockets, shivering together
through the cold winter nights, generating the heat that kept
them warm enough to survive. There is no I, only we.
“Did you and my parents ever live in the upper parts of
the lair, Mamaw?” she asked.
“You and your parents and your sister lived down here in
the labyrinth with me and many of the older families,
including my own twin sister, and my husband, and many others
who have passed.”
Her mamaw had warned her not to ask too many questions
about how people had passed, especially her parents and
sister, lest her heart become too entangled in things she
couldn’t control, but she couldn’t help it. “Did the
humans discover the Dead Hollow lair and attack it? Is that
what happened? Is that how my sister and parents were
killed?”
Her mamaw gazed at her but did not speak. It was as if
her grandmother had no idea how she could possibly answer her
question, as if she knew that the answer itself would lead to
a series of consequences too awful to think about.
“Did you see it happen?” Willa whispered, her chest
tightening as she leaned toward her mamaw. “What did the
padaran and the guards do when the day-folk attacked? How did
they defend the lair?”
“I did not see your parents and sister die, Willa,” her
grandmother said.
“But you had to have been there…” Willa said.
“There was a gathering of the clan in the great hall
that night,” her mamaw said. “And everyone was there. Your
father was one of the most respected elders of the clan, a
guardian of old ways. Immediately after the gathering, your
mother, father, and sister left the lair through the main
entrance that leads beneath the Watcher.”
“Where were they going?” Willa asked, anger leaking
into her voice. “Why wasn’t I with them? Why would I be
separated from Alliw?”
“You were here, with me,” her mamaw said gently. “I
had decided that the time had come for you to learn the song
of the little tree.”
Willa glanced over at the tree sitting in the stone
niche, with the sunlight coming down from the hole above. The
Faeran of old had used words to talk with and persuade the
ancient guardians of the forest, but songs sung in the Faeran
language were even more powerful. It was so long ago that she
had forgotten, but Willa suddenly remembered fragments of the
song her mamaw had taught her for the little tree, a soft and
beautiful melody, but the bile rose in Willa’s throat as it
came into her mind. She had gained a song, and lost a sister.
“Do you remember now?” her mamaw asked gently.
“Yes,” Willa said, her voice cracking as she wiped the
tears from her eyes. She didn’t want to cry right now. She
wanted answers from her mamaw.
“I’m sorry, Willa,” her mamaw said. “I’m sorry about
everything that happened that night. The three of them went
out into the forest, but they never returned.”
Willa looked up at her. “But what happened to them?”
“The day-folk caught them and killed them.”
“But how?” Willa asked. “They could all blend.”
“I don’t know,” her mamaw said. “You know that I
taught your mother myself, and I taught Alliw as well. If
enemies came, they should have been able to hide themselves
—”
Her grandmother stopped abruptly, unable to continue.
Willa could suddenly see the pain that had been living inside
her all these years, the tremble in her hand.
“And then I became a jaetter…” Willa whispered, to
herself as much as to her grandmother.
 She couldn’t remember all the details of that part of
her life, other than the living nightmare of the initiation—
the pleading, the isolation, the starvation, the long
training through the night.
“It is the padaran’s law that all the children of the
clan become jaetters,” her mamaw said in a low voice,
looking into her eyes. “I tried to tell them that it was too
soon for you, that you were too young, that you needed time
to grieve. Your father would have never allowed you to be a
jaetter if he’d still been alive. But your initiation
started the day after your parents died…You were just six
years old…” Her voice trailed off, and for a moment her
eyes closed and her lips pressed together. When she opened
her eyes again, she said, “You were the last jaetter to be
initiated in the Dead Hollow clan.”
“Me and Gredic.”
“Yes,” her mamaw said, “the young boy as well.”
“At least Alliw didn’t have to go through it,” Willa
said. “That would have broken my heart.”
Despite everything that had happened, and the sadness she
felt, Willa knew that she wasn’t the only one who had
suffered in their lair. The Dead Hollow clan was dying. It
had been withering for decades. From the murderous day-folk,
from the predators of the forest, from starvation, from
eating poisonous foods, from oak wilt and other diseases,
from a thousand causes, they had been dying. The empty
corridors and shadowed rooms of the vast Dead Hollow lair
were a constant reminder. Willa, Gredic, and the other
jaetters were the youngest Faeran in the clan. The few pairs
of babies that had been born in the last dozen years had been
small and sickly creatures that did not survive. Willa had
never even seen a baby with her own eyes, and she’d never
heard one laugh or cry.
Filled with too many thoughts, she looked up at her
mamaw. “Do you think the padaran can save us?”
She knew it was a foolish question.
 Of course the answer was yes.
The answerhad to be yes.
Gazing at her with steady eyes, her mamaw paused, and she
said, very quietly, “No, I don’t.”
“But…” Willa said, wanting to argue.
“The padaran cannot save us,” her mamaw whispered.
“But you must never speak of this. You must not even think
it. Knowing brings death. Do you understand?”
Willa didn’t understand, and she started to ask another
question, but she was interrupted by a faint sound in the
distance.
She rose quickly to her feet.
It was the sound of many footsteps coming through the
labyrinth of corridors toward their den.
“What is that?” her mamaw asked. “Who’s coming?”
“They’re coming for me, mamaw,” Willa said, her voice
filled with dread.
“What’s happened, Willa?” her mamaw asked in dismay.
“Where did you go last night? What have you done?”
The strained and fearful sound of her mamaw’s voice made
Willa want to cry, but she didn’t have time for that.
“They’re going to take me to the padaran,” she said as
she quickly dumped out one of her grandmother’s old medicine
bags and filled it with the contents of her satchel. All she
left in the satchel were two copper pennies that she stuffed
deep inside its inner pocket.
“But what have you done?” her grandmother asked again.
“Too much,” Willa said.
Her grandmother reached forward and pulled her behind
her, physically protecting her with her own crippled body.
“Remember: speak only Eng-lish!”
“I will, Mamaw,” Willa said, switching to the Eng-lish
words.
Gredic and Ciderg stormed into the room, hissing and
snarling. Four of the padaran’s guards followed close behind
them.
 “There she is!” Gredic shouted, pointing a clawed
finger at Willa.
As the guards reached for her, her grandmother quickly
moved in their way and tried to block them.
“Don’t hurt her!” her mamaw cried, but they shoved her
aside and knocked her to the woven-stick floor.
They were the last words Willa heard her mamaw speak as
the storming guards and hissing jaetters grabbed her with
their bony, clutching hands and dragged her down the tunnel
toward the Hall of the Padaran.
T he guards hauled her across the floor on her knees into the
cavernous central hall of the Dead Hollow lair. For as long
as she could remember, entering this place had filled her
with dread, whether her satchel was full or not. It was as if
she had always known that one day it would come to this.
They dragged her through the seething crowd of Faeran—
the throng of jaetters, guards, and hundreds of clan members
—and hurled her to the floor in shame in front of the
padaran’s empty, waiting throne.
Gredic, Ciderg, and two of the guards held her down to
the floor. The sniveling Kearnin wiped the sticky ooze
dripping from the corner of his mouth with his gnarled hand
as his brother chattered his small, sharp teeth and jabbed at
her with his stick.
Her cheeks burned with humiliation as she looked up at
the crowd of Faeran, all peering at her now, pressing around
her, gathering for the spectacle of her punishment and
disgrace.
The faces in the crowd were mostly middle-aged Faeran,
with few grandmothers and grandfathers among them, for many
of the elders had passed away in the last few years, and
there were no children other than the hissing jaetters.
Having spent most of their living hours in the torchlit
shadowed walls of the decaying lair rather than the moonlit
meadows of the forest, many of the Faeran had mottled dark
gray skin, sticky and muculent like slimy toads, and their
hair fell gray and straggly from their heads. Others had
greenish skin similar to her own.
Most of the Faeran in the crowd stared at her with
scowling faces, anxious to see her fall. Others watched with
despairing, fearful eyes filled with sadness. The people came
because they had to come. They watched because they had to
watch. They had to be part of the clan, no matter what it was
doing. If the clan was cheering, everyone had to cheer. If
the clan was hissing, everyone had to hiss. There was no
choice in this—no standing against the commands of the
padaran or the will of the clan.There is no I, only we.
Many of them didn’t know the reason she had been brought
there, but they still snapped and sneered, for the padaran
and his most ardent followers had shown them year after year
that to be weak, to be dragged, to be down, was itself
deserving of shame in the lair’s eyes.
 “It’s one of the jaetters!” a Faeran in the crowd
murmured to the one next to him.
“It’s the little woodwitch,” one of the others said.
“Look at her! They’ve really got her.”
“What’d she do?”
“She went missing during the night.”
“She shouldn’t be sneaking out on her own.”
“It’s that old witch that teaches her.”
“The padaran sent out search parties during the night.”
“I heard she was dead.”
But here I am, Willa thought, beneath the cuts and blows
of the grasping hands and the whispering words, wounded and
weak, held by force in the center of the room for all to see,
surrounded by the scolding, murmuring crowd, as they all
waited for the padaran to arrive.
Willa looked around at the grimacing faces for anyone who
might defend her, anyone who might remind the others of her
loyalty to the clan or beg the guards to show her mercy. She
spotted her friend Gillen. She was sure Gillen would rush
forward to the front of the crowd, push Gredic away from her,
and talk to the guards on her behalf. But Gillen was standing
there, just watching, too frightened to move.
“Gillen,” Willa said, looking toward her.
Gillen held her gaze for a moment, her eyes pleading for
Willa to understand, and then looked away in shame.
Willa’s mind filled with despair. Not even Gillen was
going to help her.
Willa lowered her head and peered down through the floor
of meshed sticks, down to the creek that ran below, wondering
if she could somehow escape into the dark spaces beneath the
lair, slip into the stream, and let it carry her away from
this wretched place.
But she knew there was no escape. There never had been
and there never would be. She was part of this clan, and it
was part of her, as inextricable as root and soil. Willa
looked up, beyond the throng of the Faeran that surrounded
her, toward the ceiling. The hall had been built for many
thousands of people to gather here, but far fewer than that
remained. The walls of the great hall rose up all around,
vast expanses of dark brown woven sticks reaching to a large
gaping hole broken to the sky above. What was left of the
decaying ceiling and walls was held aloft by the ancient,
massive woven-stick sculptures of giant trees, the columns of
their trunks soaring upward to spreading canopies above.
Thousands of hand-curled leaves glimmered with emerald green,
and brilliant kaleidoscopes of ornately woven birds of all
shapes and sizes and colors seemed to be flying through the
branches of the trees. The name had been changed to the Hall
of the Padaran decades before, but in the old language the
great hall had once been called the Hall of the Glittering
Birds. The walls of the great hall were ragged with rot now,
the woodwitches who made them long dead, and many of the
sculptures of the birds had disintegrated. The only birds
that remained undamaged by time weren’t the sculptures, but
actual living birds—carrion-eating black vultures circling
in the hole above, floating on the smoky, steaming heat of
the rising air, waiting for another Faeran body.
As Willa’s eyes drifted down from the vultures, she
noticed a pile of tattered brown rags lying on the floor near
the base of one of the woven-stick trees. But then she
realized it wasn’t just a pile of rags. When she looked more
carefully, she saw the long blackish hair and the dark brown
skin matching the color and texture of what was around it. It
was a very old Faeran woman crumpled on the floor, and she
wasblending .
Mamaw, Willa thought, her heart leaping.
Somehow, her grandmother had pulled herself along the
floor with her arms, dragging her useless legs behind her,
and made it all the way to the hall, her ragged medicine bag
slung over her shoulder.
To the rest of the clan, she was a craggy old stump of a
woman, too rough and gnarled to care about or even notice,
but to Willa, she was a tendril of bright green hope.
“Thank you, Mamaw,” Willa said softly.
At that moment, the room shifted. All the faces in the
crowd blanched with dread. Hundreds of pairs of eyes widened.
Bodies went still. Whispers went silent.
Willa turned to see the padaran emerging from a
passageway behind the throne.
The padaran moved with commanding ease, hunched with
massive shoulders, his arms and legs stout with muscles, and
the quills on the back of his bulging neck as thick and sharp
as a porcupine’s. His skin wasn’t gray like many of the
others, or streaked and spotted green like hers, but a woody
bronze. As the crowd looked up at him in awe, his face seemed
to almost glisten with color, shimmering like the reflection
of moving water in the morning sun. He was the god of the
clan, their sacred leader, their padaran.
Willa had never seen or even heard of another Faeran like
him. He was said to be very old, but he did not look old. He
was the strongest and most vibrant Faeran she knew. Some
believed him to be what Faeran used to be. Others said he was
what Faeran would someday become. But no one still alive
seemed to know, or at least be willing to talk about, who or
what he truly was. To the inhabitants of the lair, the
padaran was not a mortal being. It was said that he had never
been a boy, never been a normal Faeran. He had no wife, no
children, no twin brother, no name. He had come down from the
Great Mountain to lead them, and he held the clan together
with absolute power.
The padaran’s guards stood ready for his orders, and his
pack of sniveling jaetters swarmed around him, but he ignored
them all. As he sat on his throne of blackened, twisted,
rotting sticks, it creaked beneath his weight. He gestured
toward Willa with a flick of his clawed finger. Gredic and
the guards immediately dragged her forward and hurled her to
the floor at the padaran’s feet.
 As the padaran stared down at her with his searing glare,
Willa wanted to wither into a little ball.
The god of the clan leaned forward, looming over her with
his long, square, protruding face and his massive biting
jaws.
“Why have my guards brought you before me in this way?”
he snarled. “Where have you been, jaetter?”
W illa wanted to stay strong. She wanted to be brave, to stand
up to him, but she couldn’t keep her body from shaking. The
menacing stare of the padaran was too much to bear.
“What have you done, jaetter?” he asked her, his voice
low and growling.
She knew he was already aware of much of what she had
done. He wanted her to explain herself, to beg him for
forgiveness, but even lying on the floor before him, under
the looming threat of his presence, she couldn’t find the
dark and murky pit in herself to say the words he wanted to
hear.
“I don’t know why your guards brought me here,” she
said sullenly. “I am a loyal member of the clan.”
The crowd gasped at her insolence. Nothing but
subservience and apology was ever allowed at the feet of the
padaran.
Gredic darted in and jabbed her with his stick, outraged
that she wasn’t whimpering in submission.
The whole room began to erupt, but the padaran raised his
open hand and closed his clawed fingers into a fist, bringing
the room to immediate silence.
The padaran picked up his long, steel spear in his right
hand. The jaetters, and the guards, and everyone in the crowd
had seen him use the spear of power many times to kill the
Faeran who had committed crimes or gone against the will of
the clan. The padaran’s spear was the only metal allowed in
Dead Hollow other than what the jaetters brought back in
their satchels, and each jaetter’s take must always be given
to the padaran the moment the jaetter returned.
Still holding his spear, the padaran peered down at Willa
lying on the floor in front of him.
“I will tell you why you are here,” he said, his voice
filled with a dark and scathing tone, his eyes flicking out
across the watching crowd. “Last night you crept past the
Watcher. The Watcher sees all, and so do I. Not only did you
leave the lair without my instruction or my permission, you
left without the other jaetters. You went out thieving on
your own.”
The padaran’s eyes shifted back and forth across the
faces of the crowd, gauging their reaction as he spoke.
“And when you finally returned, you slithered back into
the lair like a rat, without making yourself known to me or
my guards. You entered places in the lair that you knew you
were not allowed and you did things you knew were wrong.”
 By the time he came to the last of her crimes, his voice
had become a vicious roar. “What is the meaning of this
behavior, jaetter?”
The walls of the hall seemed to vibrate with the power of
his voice, and the people hunkered down in fear.
Willa wanted to scream up at him that she’d been hurt
and needed his help. But she knew he wouldn’t care, and if
he found out that she’d been shot by a homesteader, it would
make him even angrier.
She could hear the murmurs of hostility toward her
spreading through the crowd, and the padaran seemed to sense
it, too. He leaned down toward her and shouted, “This is
your clan, jaetter! These are your people! Everything you do
must be for the others! Do you understand the harm you cause
them when you split away from me and the other members of the
clan, when you do these things on your own? The members of a
clan must stick together. We must fight for each other! Care
for each other! There is no I, only we.”
As he said these words, his voice soared and his skin
glistened, and the people looked up at him with adoration in
their eyes.
When he rose once again to his full height and stepped
toward her with his spear in his hand, the swarm of the crowd
shrunk back in fear. The jaetters cowered. Willa’s heart
pounded in her chest. He was going to thrust the point of the
steel spear into her body at any moment.
“Do you wish to die, is that it?” he asked her. “And
after all that you did wrong, you didn’t come to me when you
returned to the lair. You were pulled to my throne against
your will by my guards. And you appear to have come empty-
handed. You have nothing! You were a good jaetter once, but
now I see nothing before me but a creature without a clan.”
They were the harshest of words. A Faeran without a clan
did not survive. And the padaran’s words weren’t just a
punishment or a reprimand. They were a threat. With a thrust
of his spear, he could kill her, but with the roar of a
command, he could cast her out, a fate that most Faeran
considered more cruel than death itself.
“Do you wish to starve, is that it?” he asked. “Do you
wish to freeze alone in the winter cold?” he asked, raising
his voice as the surrounding swarm hissed and jeered at her.
“You’re acting like a girl who doesn’t understand the
value of the clan that protects her!”
Seeing that there was no way for her to defend herself,
Gredic rushed in and grabbed her satchel. He tried to yank it
away, but she’d been expecting his attack. She leapt to her
feet and clutched the satchel to her side. The padaran
stepped back to let the two jaetters fight it out, one
against the other. But Gredic’s brother, Ciderg, charged in.
He struck her so hard that she hit the ground, gasping for
air, her ribs burning. Ciderg ripped the satchel away from
her hands and handed it to his brother.
Gredic held the satchel up for all to see. “It feels
very light!” he shouted triumphantly as the crowd hooted and
hollered in return. They’d been watching the rivalry between
the jaetters for years, with all their tricks and takes,
their rises and their falls.
But as Gredic pawed through the satchel, it became clear
by the grim expression on his face that something was wrong.
“It can’t be empty,” he grumbled in confusion. “It can’t
be…”
But then he hissed with pleasure.
“The sneaky little beast has hidden something in a
concealed pocket…She’s trying keep her take for herself!
She’s trying to steal from the clan!”
Then Gredic went silent.
His expression changed.
It was clear to everyone that he had discovered something
in the satchel so deliciously wicked that even he couldn’t
believe his luck.
He lifted two small brown coins above his head. “After
all the trouble she’s caused, all Willa got last night were
these two copper pennies!” he called out above the rising
clamor of the crowd. “Two copper pennies! That’s all she
got!”
As Willa gathered herself slowly, painfully, up onto her
knees, and then up onto her feet, the padaran moved toward
her with his spear.
Standing before him, she did not look away as others
always did. She stared right back at him.
My name is Willa, she thought defiantly.
But as the padaran studied her, the malice in his
expression slowly changed to something else, something more
wary and uncertain than simply angry. And that was her only
hope now.
She had snuck into the homesteader’s house and stolen
his belongings to get the padaran’s attention, to earn his
praise. But now that the sun had risen and the harsh light of
the padaran’s gaze was on her, her heart pounded in her
chest.
Would there be praise or punishment?
The bronze skin of the padaran’s face seemed to glimmer
as he turned toward Gredic. He looked at the two pennies in
Gredic’s hand, then out at the crowd. And then finally, his
eyes came back to her.
“Is this truly what you’ve brought me?” the padaran
asked. “You’ve been a strong and effective jaetter for this
clan, quick of hand and deft of thought. But two nights ago,
you failed me with an empty satchel. And the night before
that your satchel was light as well. And now this…Is this
the take you have brought to your padaran?”
Willa met his eyes, and held his gaze as steady as she
could, but she did not speak.
“Answer me,” he demanded in a growl. “Is this what you
have brought me, Willa?”
“N o, my padaran,” Willa said finally, her tone soft and
filled with respect. But then her voice took on a sharper
edge. “This is what I brought for Gredic.”
Gredic hissed and moved toward her, but the padaran
pointed his clawed finger at the jaetter. “You stay right
there,” he snarled, and Gredic stopped dead in his tracks,
too frightened to move another step.
 When the padaran looked at Willa, a knowing expression
slowly inched across his face. “Gredic and the other
jaetters have been stealing your take from you…”
Willa nodded. “Yes, my padaran. He got his two cents
this time, just as I knew he would.”
“It’s a lie!” Gredic screamed. “I bring home a good
take every night! You know I do! The little beast is lying!”
“If I may, my padaran,” Willa said, “I would like your
permission to walk over to that tree over there so that I can
show you something.”
The padaran glanced toward the woven-stick column, and
then looked back at Willa, his eyes narrowing in curiosity.
“You may go,” he said.
Willa noticed the padaran’s eyes shift across the room.
She couldn’t be sure, but it was almost as if he was trying
to gauge the crowd’s reaction to what was happening. She had
noticed in the past that although he was the great leader of
the clan, he seemed to live in worry of what his subjects
were seeing when they looked at him, what they were thinking
at that moment.
As she walked over to the woven-stick tree, she felt and
heard the moment the people in the crowd behind her realized
there was actually an old woman lying on the floor at the
base of the tree.
“May I borrow your bag, Grandmother?” Willa asked,
using the most formal title she could for her mamaw,
reminding people in a small, quiet way that she herself was
just a girl, with a grandmother and a clan, respectful of the
old ways of her people. Willa knew from watching the padaran
that words had power, the power to persuade and the power to
deceive.
As her mamaw handed her the old, tattered bag, she looked
up at Willa and their eyes met. Be careful, my child, she
seemed to be saying.
“Thank you, Grandmother,” Willa said.
 “What kind of trick is this?” Gredic hissed in protest
as Willa returned with her mamaw’s medicine bag and set it
before the throne. “I have brought this for you, my
padaran…”
“And what is it?” the padaran asked.
Taking that as her cue, Willa stepped forward and reached
into the bag.
“My padaran, will you please…” she asked softly, and
then, as the crowd looked on, Willa poured a waterfall of
silver coins out of the bag into the padaran’s cupped hands.
Gredic writhed in anguish. “It’s one of the little
beast’s dirty tricks!”
“You have done very well, little one,” the padaran
said, using the term “little one” for Willa as if she
wasn’t just a thieving jaetter, but once again a child of
the clan, to be protected and honored. Words have power,
Willa thought again. He knew it. And she knew it.
“But this is not all, my padaran…” she said as she
pulled wads of crumpled green bills from the bag and put them
in his hands.
The crowd erupted with pleasing sounds at the riches she
had brought. Then she pulled out the Cherokee arrowheads,
which were highly prized in the clan, for they could be used
on the tips of their spears.
“You have pleased the padaran, my child,” the god of
the clan said as she filled his hands with treasure, the
praise pouring out of him like poison from a festering wound.
Willa could see her grandmother watching her and the
padaran with steady eyes, as if she was seeing the plot of a
play unfold.
“But that is not all…” Willa said again.
As she slowly pulled out the glittering silver jewelry
she’d stolen from the man’s lair and laid it in the
padaran’s hands, his eyes widened and whispers of approval
ran through the crowd.
 There was no doubt now. It was a large and bountiful
take, but it wasn’t important just because the padaran and
his guards could sell and trade these goods for the benefit
of the clan. It wasn’t just about the money and the
valuables. The size and tradition of a jaetter’s take was a
symbol of his or her loyalty to the padaran, her embrace and
acceptance of everything that held the clan together.
But as the padaran and the jaetters and everyone in the
crowd gazed upon her take with gleaming eyes, Willa felt a
strange and lingering shame.
So much had come to depend on her take each night—
whether it was more than Gredic’s or less, whether the
padaran was pleased or angry—but deep down, she couldn’t
help herself from wondering what difference it all made to
her and her people and the forest in which they all lived.
Gredic groveled low to the floor as he crept toward the
padaran like a slithering creature. “You know I am your
loyal servant, my padaran…”
Willa watched as the padaran’s eyes slid reluctantly
over to Gredic.
“You know you can trust me…” Gredic said.
“Speak what’s on your mind,” the padaran said gruffly.
“What the little beast said isn’t true. We haven’t
been stealing her take. She’s been stealing ours. This take
is ours, ours to give to the padaran. She stole it from us
and hid it with the old witch. We all know the little beast
is a woodwitch, too. She can’t hide it.”
As the gang of jaetters surrounded her and started a slow
and steady hiss in unison with Gredic’s charges against her,
Willa’s heart began to sink. She knew that no matter what
she said or did now, most of them were going to support
Gredic’s claim against her.
Willa glanced over at Gillen. Her friend’s eyes blazed
with anger at the way the jaetters were turning on her. But
when Gillen moved forward to stand in her defense, Kearnin
and the other jaetters shoved her back. Willa looked over at
her mamaw, but what could her mamaw do for her? How could she
save her?
The padaran turned to Willa, his eyes moving from her
streaked and spotted face to the leaf-colored skin of her
arms and legs to her head of long, dark hair.
“Your fellow jaetter has made a charge against you,”
the padaran said. “Can you prove that this was your take?
Can you prove that you didn’t steal this from Gredic?”
Willa met the padaran’s eyes. She knew he was far
smarter than the other people in the room, far smarter than
even Gredic, and he already knew the answer to all his
questions. He knew this was her take. He knew she had tricked
Gredic. But he wanted to watch her confront this new
challenge.
Willa held the padaran’s gaze in silence for several
seconds, her chest tightening with frustration. Now she had
to prove it. Not just venture down into the valley miles away
and sneak into a killing man’s lair. Not just get shot and
crawl back into Dead Hollow on her belly, and fight and hide
and blend and run. She felt it boiling up inside her. Now she
hadprove prove
it, that she had actually stolen these
things,prove that she was loyal to the clan,prove that she
was loyal to the padaran.
She looked at Gredic and the other jaetters, and out
across the crowd of Faeran waiting for her answer. Then she
looked over at her grandmother, who was watching her and the
padaran.
Finally, she nodded. “Yes, I think I can,” she said.
She lifted the bag and held it above her head.
“If what you say is true, Gredic, that I stole this take
from you, then you should have no trouble telling everyone
here what remains inside this bag.”
She could see Gredic furiously trying to figure out what
she was doing. She could see him trying to think it through.
She had put so much treasure into the padaran’s hands. How
could there possibly be more still in the bag?
 Gredic’s face grimaced with uncertainty. “It’s another
trick!” he declared.
“You claim that it was your take,” she said for all to
hear. “So is there something still left in the bag, or is it
empty now?”
G redic studied her with his narrow eyes, his face contorting
as he grappled with her question. He looked at the deflated
bag, then back at her.
“It’s empty,” he said. “There’s nothing left of
value in there.”
“Gredic is right,” Willa said loudly, nodding as she
looked around at the faces in the crowd.
 But then she turned and looked at the padaran. “He’s
right that what is left in the bag is of little monetary
value, certainly no value at all tohim . It’s a personal
gift from me to the padaran to thank him for all he’s done
for me, and for our people.”
Everyone watched as Willa reached her hand into the bag
and pulled out a small pouch of brown material. She bowed her
head in a gesture of honor and handed the padaran the chewing
tobacco she had stolen from the lair of the day-folk man.
She knew that the tobacco that the humans used was one of
the padaran’s most private and beloved pleasures. The
padaran’s shoulders rolled with seething anticipation as he
pulled the tobacco into his covetous hands, not just because
he was pleased with her gift, or because her words had
touched his heart, but because he loved the conniving way she
had tricked her rivals. He was the god of the clan, but she
knew that deep down he would suck delight from the thought
that she had learned the power of deceit from him. And the
truth was, she had. She’d been watching him all her life,
learning how to gain his smiles and avoid his strikes, how to
not just persevere but to prevail in the world he’d created.
“This is a very good take, Willa,” he said, using her
name in the most powerful way.
Gredic and the other jaetters exploded in contempt,
hissing and snarling. They swayed their bodies and gnashed
their sharp little teeth. Despite all the wrong she’d done
against the clan, she had once again shifted her colors and
slipped away. She was the mouse that always squirmed out of
their grasp!
And the jaetters knew that her words to the padaran were
all part of her trickery.They were the loyal ones, not her!
But worst of all, Gredic and Ciderg and Kearnin and the
others knew that Gredic’s time as the leader of the jaetters
was waning.
But Willa, despite all her victories, couldn’t feel the
glory of her moment the way she thought she would. Deep down,
the actions she performed and the words she said left her
cold and empty. She had brought her satchel home fuller than
it had ever been, she was surrounded by her clan, and praised
by the padaran. This was what she had always wanted. But the
only thing she could think of—the only sensation she wanted
to feel—was the friendship of the wolves, the acceptance of
the bears, and the sight of the glistening lake. And then—to
her surprise—she thought about what the human boy had called
“cookies.” Those peculiar little lumps she had passed
through the mesh of the prison cell.
For some reason, it felt like that —helping the human boy
trapped in the dark prisons of her clan—that strange and
I
dangerous thing that came from the deep inside her instead
of the we of the clan, had been her most satisfying reward
for coming home with her satchel full.
Her mind kept returning to one thing: the way the man
with his killing-stick had looked at her when he found her
wounded in his barn. She remembered the way he had spoken to
her in soft tones and found a cloth to tend to her wound. All
the other thoughts slipped away into a murky, muddled
nothingness, but that one act of kindness dwelled in her mind
and her heart like nothing ever had before.
As the jaetters jeered at her, the padaran looked upon
her, and the rest of the clan watched it all, Willa turned to
her grandmother at the edge of the room.
Her grandmother’s eyes were looking at her, holding on
to Willa with everything she could. But her mamaw’s eyes
weren’t filled with pride or happiness or even relief in her
accomplishments. They were filled with worry. It seemed as if
her mamaw was thinking, You’re blending in a way that I
never taught you. But it’s keeping us both alive.
When Willa turned back to look at the padaran, she was
startled to see that he wasn’t looking at the crowd like he
normally did, or even at her, but across the room at her
grandmother.
 Willa knew that her grandmother had lived a quiet,
peaceful life for many years, blending into the rest of the
clan, nurturing the plants in her den, and raising her
granddaughter. But now the padaran’s eyes were studying her
grandmother as if he was wondering just what kind of trickery
the old woman had brought into his hall.
Then he turned slowly back toward Willa.
“Come here, Willa,” he ordered, his tone filled with a
commanding tone that turned her blood ice-cold.
With those simple, blunt words, the room went silent.
Willa’s chest tightened.
Having no other choice, she stepped toward the looming
presence of the great leader.
“I want you to tell me where you got this take,” he
said.
“I stole it, my padaran,” she said, trying to sound
proud, but her voice was trembling. It was a truth she knew
she should be proud of in his eyes. He had been the one who
taught her how to steal, how to deceive. But she felt the
heat rising to her cheeks. He had seen something. He had
sensed something.
“Where did you steal it?” he asked.
Knowing that it would anger him if he knew she had risked
creeping into a homesteader’s lair, she didn’t answer.
“Where did you get all this, Willa?”
The padaran knew she didn’t want to divulge her secrets
to her jaetter rivals, but he pressed her anyway. He seemed
to sense that she’d seen something or done something out
there in the world that had changed her in some way.
When he stepped closer to her, a drop of sweat dripped
from his face and fell into her hair. He was so close that
she could smell the musk of his body. She desperately wanted
to shrink away from him. But she knew she couldn’t.
He leaned his face to her neck and sniffed. “What is it
that I smell on you?” he asked her.
 “Nothing, my padaran,” she said as quickly as she
could.
“Have you been touching some sort of”—he paused and
tilted his head and sniffed again—“some sort of animal?
What kind of animal is that I smell?”
“Nothing, my padaran,” she said again.
He clamped onto her shoulder with a crushing hand. “You
will come with me.”
T he padaran had commanded it, so Willa had no choice but to
follow him. The god of the clan pulled her behind the throne
and through a woven-stick archway that led into a narrow
passage.
She tried to wipe down the quills on the back of her neck
with the cup of her hand, worrying that they’d betray the
increasing sense of dread churning through her body.
 Still carrying the spear of power, the padaran led her
into the inner sanctuary of his private den, a heavily
protected part of the lair that she and the other members of
the clan were never allowed to enter. It was a great honor,
but she couldn’t help but realize that she wasn’t being
invited. She was being brought by force.
Every instinct in her body was telling her to run, to get
away from him. But the padaran walked fast and hard, pulling
her along with the dark and invisible force of his will.
Two guards pushed her from behind with their sharpened
spears pointed at her back. One of them was Lorcan, the
commander of the padaran’s guards.
Lorcan was the tallest Faeran guard she had ever seen,
with long, gangly arms and legs. He had a mash of hair the
color of rotting twigs, a high forehead like a jutting
boulder, and black, bulging eyes. He’d been serving the
padaran since long before she was born.
Wedged between the padaran ahead of her and the two
guards behind her, she climbed her way up the narrow, winding
woven-stick tunnel, which was so tight that the padaran’s
shoulders scraped the walls, and so steep that her calves
burned. When they finally reached the room at the top, she
gasped at what she saw.
The room glowed with the orange blazing light of many
burning torches. And it was stacked from floor to ceiling
with hundreds of day-folk objects, from the tools she’d seen
in homesteader barns to strange mechanical instruments of all
shapes and sizes. She had no idea what all these bewildering
things were for, or why they were here.
She had always thought the padaran sold and traded their
takes to the day-folk for food and other necessities for the
clan. But now she saw that he’d been acquiring these objects
year after year, hiding them all this time.
“If we are going to survive,” the padaran said, “then
we must understand the tools and weapons of our enemy.”
 She reached toward a complicated-looking brass device
with spoked metal circles and many levers, dials, and
thumbscrews.
“The newcomers use it to look at the terrain of the
earth and plan out the paths of the roads they build,” he
said. “Humans do not seem to be able to understand the
world, or even find their way through it, until they have
measured it and marked it on their maps.”
As he spoke, the padaran’s long, clawed fingers caressed
the device’s wheels and knobs possessively. He did not
appear to know how to use the machine, but he held it as if
he owned and controlled its inner power.
Then the padaran walked over to a collection of hammers,
spikes, and other iron accoutrements. “The clanging men use
these to lay down the long steel rails that the steaming
beasts follow into the forest,” he said, picking up one of
the iron spikes. “This is the future,” he declared, looking
at the metal object with true reverence in his eyes.
It was hard not to let his confidence, and his knowledge
of the outside world, draw her in, but she didn’t
understand. Did he mean that the future belonged to those who
controlled the metal? Or that more of these things he called
the steaming beasts were coming? Or that iron was the
direction he was going to take the Dead Hollow clan? Or that
the spike itself possessed some sort of magical power?
But the most disturbing thing was that she wasn’t even
sure he knew the answer. He seemed convinced that the power
of the humans lay in these strange metal objects, but he
didn’t seem to truly understand the purpose of the devices
or how to use most of them. It was as if he thought that by
simply possessing them or being near them he would somehow
gain their power.
She had watched the padaran all her life. He was the
closest thing she had to a father. He’d always been a strong
and forceful leader for the clan, someone she looked up to,
someone she feared. But it seemed as if he had spent
countless hours in this room, holding these objects in his
hands, studying them, trying to divine their hidden secrets.
They had become a festering obsession in his mind.
When her eyes were drawn to a long, gleaming brass tube
mounted on a three-legged stand, he said, “Step forward and
look through it.” It appeared to be one of the few devices
he had actually figured out how to use.
She studied the contraption uncertainly, wondering if its
purpose was to rip out little girls’ eyeballs when they went
against the will of the clan.
Seeing her timidness, he put his hand on the device to
steady it, to hold it in his control, as if to make it clear
that only through him was it safe for her to use.
Quieting her breathing as best she could, she stepped
closer, leaned slowly forward, and put her eye up to the end
of the long tube. When she blinked, the flash of her eyelash
startled her so severely that she leapt back in surprise.
“Now conquer your fear and try again,” he said. “Close
your left eye and look through with your right.”
As she leaned forward, she squinted her eye one way and
then the other until she began to see light coming through
the tube. Then she caught a glimpse of several Faeran
standing together talking among themselves. She pulled back
in astonishment. There were no such people in the room, and
yet she saw them quite clearly!
“The humans call this a telescope,” he said, showing
her a small opening in the wall through which the tube was
pointed. When she peered through the hole, Willa saw the
Faeran gathered in the Hall of the Padaran far below them,
like bees in a crowded hive. From this vantage point, the
padaran could spy on all the Faeran in the great hall, but
other uses for the device immediately sprang into her mind as
well.
Watching her, the padaran asked, “Do you understand the
device’s power?”
 “Yes,” she said excitedly. “If you took it to the top
of the Great Mountain and pointed it outward, you could see
to the edge of the world.”
The padaran’s eyes widened ever so slightly. She could
see that it wasn’t an idea that had occurred to him.
“Now follow me,” he said, dragging her by the arm as
the two guards followed close behind them.
As they left the padaran’s hoard of human-made objects
behind them, they crossed through a series of dark, empty
rooms with crumbling ceilings and disintegrating walls, one
room interconnected to the other, a vast hive of hundreds of
abandoned Faeran dens. The murky world of the hollow,
dripping rooms had once been the most luxurious chambers of
the Faeran of old, but they had come to stink of black and
seeping mold.
When she glanced behind her, the guards seemed just as
anxious to leave this decaying place as she was.
The padaran moved quickly through the abandoned dens,
intent on reaching some distant point on the other side.
Finally, they came to an area where the walls of the
rooms and corridors were mostly still intact and a little bit
of light filtered down through small holes in the woven-stick
ceiling. They crossed through a den that looked different
from any Faeran room she had ever seen. Clean and dry, it was
adorned with human furniture—a table, a chair, a mirror, a
wax candleholder, a small decorative box for holding tobacco,
even pillows and woolen blankets. It startled Willa to see
what looked like a human’s bedroom inside the lair of Dead
Hollow.
But the room didn’t smell of humans.
It smelled like the padaran.
It was the padaran’s private den. But what astounded her
was that there wasn’t a cocoon of woven reeds like her and
the other Faeran slept in. The padaran appeared to sleep in a
large, wooden day-folk bed!
 “Come this way,” he said, pulling her through the room
and into the next.
They reached a narrow passage and went up a winding
tunnel toward what smelled like fresh air, but Willa’s mind
couldn’t let go of what she had just seen.
The padaran’s collection of day-folk objects…The human
bed in his den…Why does he think I won’t tell anyone about
what I’m seeing here? she wondered. Where is he taking me?
Knowing brings death. Her grandmother’s words slipped
into her thoughts.
The padaran pushed open a woven-stick door with his steel
spear and pulled her outside, into a dense and secluded area
of forest. Lorcan and the other guard came up close behind
her with their spears as the padaran led her along a narrow
trail, crowded with the bent and twisted limbs of blackened
trees.
Looking around her, Willa could see that they had come
out somewhere on the upper side of the Great Mountain, just
above the lair, but she’d never been to this area of the
forest before. On both sides of the path, she saw what looked
like white bones and rotting brown heaps lying in the leaves.
A sickening feeling crept into Willa’s stomach.
Where are they taking me? she thought again. And why is
the padaran still carrying his spear?
“Back in my rooms, you saw the machines of the humans,”
the padaran said as they walked.
“Yes, my padaran,” she said, glancing behind her at
Lorcan and the other guard, wondering if she could outrun
them. Her chest started pulling more air into her lungs,
getting her ready.
“And you understand who I am,” the padaran said.
“You’re the sacred leader of our clan, my padaran,”
she said, as her eyes scanned the forest around them. Her
skin was beginning to crawl. The truth was, she had no idea
who he was, where he came from, or how he had come to wield
such dominion over the clan.
 “You see now that I can give you anything you can
imagine from the day-folk world,” he said.
“Yes, my padaran,” she said, her throat feeling tighter
and tighter. She had no idea why she would want something
from the day-folk world, but this appeared to be an offer of
great significance to him, intended to impress her and draw
her in.
“And I can give you more power in the clan than you ever
imagined possible.”
“Yes, my padaran,” she said, the muscles in her legs
beginning to twitch.
“If Gredic and the others are bothering you, then I can
eliminate them, get them out of your way.”
“Yes, my padaran,” she said, her breaths getting
shorter. Nowthis was something she understood.
“If I wish, I can make you the leader of the jaetters.”
“Yes, my padaran,” she said. But why was he telling her
this here in the middle of the forest?
Finally, the padaran stopped. When he turned and peered
into her eyes, she couldn’t help but shrink back from the
long, sharp tip of his steel spear. With his voice low and
menacing, he said, “But if you lie to me, Willa, if you try
to deceive me in any way…”
“No, my padaran, I wouldn’t do that,” she said, trying
to back up but feeling the point of Lorcan’s spear against
her spine.
“If you try to go against me, then I will hurt you,”
the padaran said. “And I’ll hurt everything you love. Do
you understand?”
“I haven’t been going against you, my padaran,” she
said, her voice shaking.
“Do you know why I’ve brought you out here?” he asked.
“N o, my padaran,” she answered. “I do not.”
“The world is changing,” the padaran said, as they
continued down the path through the forest, leaving the heaps
and bones behind them. “If we are to survive, we must change
with it. The day-folk homesteaders have been living in these
mountains for a hundred years, and now the newcomers are
pouring in with their iron machines. We cannot stop them.”
 “But where are they all coming from?” she asked him.
She still didn’t understand why he had brought her into this
part of the forest, but the questions burned in her mind.
“Are they coming from the other side of the Great Mountain?
Or the ridges that we see in the distance?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They come from a
place where the land is flat.”
“Flat?” Willa said. “I don’t understand. What about
the mountains?”
“Beyond the mountains, beyond the valleys, beyond the
towns at the edge of our world, beyond all that you can see,
the land is flat. To get to that land, they crossed a
stationary river so wide that it took sixty phases of the
moon to travel across it.”
Willa took a breath in astonishment. “How could that be
possible?”
“They floated on the water in the carcasses of trees
that they cut down in the world they came from. The day-folk
are cutters, builders, conquerors, spreading from place to
place.”
The skin on the side of Willa’s neck tingled with fear.
She didn’t know what all those words meant, but she knew it
wasn’t good. When she listened to the padaran, the threat of
the invading day-folk seemed more looming and horrible than
ever before.
“We must learn their ways, their language, and their
skills, Willa,” he told her. “We must master their tools
and their weapons and their way of life, or our clan will
die. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my padaran,” she said, marveling at how much he
seemed to understand the way the world worked.
“The day-folk are a violent and hateful people,” he
continued, “filled with capabilities beyond our imagining.
But they are driven by greed. That’s why we steal from them,
for without their money, we have nothing. We need their
tools, their weapons, but even beyond their greed, they are
consumed with fears and superstitions.”
“What do they fear?” she asked in amazement.
“They kill the things that they think might do them or
their children harm: bears, mountain lions, deep forests—
they fear anything that is different from the place they came
from. And that is where we will gain an advantage, for we
know these forests and these mountains far better than they
do. The money the day-folk pay is called a bounty. They will
pay us to kill the things they fear, and to bring them the
meat and fur. That is why I am selecting a few of my best
jaetters to begin collecting a very special kind of take.”
Far from the lair now, they had reached a deeply shadowed
area of the forest, and the padaran turned to Lorcan and
said, “Bring it to me.”
Lorcan and the other guard walked into the forest, did
something on the ground with their hands, and then returned
with what looked like the jaws of a large fanged animal. But
the jaws weren’t old white bone. They were gleaming, bluish-
black steel, and they were lined with many sharp teeth.
“The newcomers call it a leghold trap,” the padaran
explained. “It’s one of the ways they capture and kill the
animals of the forest.”
Willa stepped away from the trap in revulsion, finding it
almost too horrible to believe that even the newcomers would
attack animals in such a cruel and vicious way.
“But why do they do this?” she asked.
She could imagine the snapping steel jaws of the trap
clamping onto the leg of an animal, the poor creature trying
desperately to get away, days upon days terrified and
starving, its bloody leg caught in the trap until its enemy
finally arrived to kill it.
“Come this way,” the padaran said, leading them down a
path that wound through the forest. “You must be careful
here, for beneath the leaves we have set traps all along this
trail. Place your feet exactly where I place mine. You must
follow in my footsteps.”
Her stomach churned.
That was why he’d brought her here, to join him, to
follow him, to bond herself to him even more profoundly than
she already was. He wanted her, with all her forest skills
and wily ways, to be the leader of his new force of animal-
killing jaetters.
As she walked behind the padaran, carefully putting her
feet where he put his, her heart beat heavily in her chest.
If she put her foot in the wrong spot, the snap of the
trap’s jaws would clamp onto her ankle and crush her leg
like a twig. She tried to look ahead, tried to see where the
traps were before she came to them, but they were hidden
beneath the leaves.
“How do you know where to step, my padaran?” she asked
as she followed him along the path.
“We’ve put a stone next to each trap to show us its
location. We know to look for the stones, and avoid the
leaves next to them, but the animals do not.”
Willa marveled at the cruel effectiveness of this trail
of death that the padaran and his men had laid.
“This way,” the padaran whispered to her as he moved
quietly along the path. “Now look ahead. This is where we
found the den.”
The den? Willa thought in sudden shock.Whose den?
Finally, the padaran crouched down with his spear at his
side, and Willa crouched with him. The padaran pointed to a
gnarly old cedar tree in the distance, its base nearly eight
feet across and its thick, red, shaggy bark covered with
bright green moss. It appeared as if lightning had struck the
tree, scorched it black, and left a long, twisting crevice
that now led to what looked like a small cave inside the
hollow of its trunk.
Fear crept up Willa’s spine.
 “What’s inside the cave?” she whispered, but she
didn’t want to know the answer. She didn’t want to be
there. She didn’t want to think about what was going to
happen. There were stones all along the path to the cedar
tree. The jaws of the traps were open and waiting, their
springs coiled tight and ready to snap.
Suddenly, she heard a soft whining noise coming from the
direction of the tree. She sniffed the air to see if she
could pick up the scent, and then she heard the whining
again.
It took her several seconds, but then she closed her eyes
and pulled in a lungful of air in despair.
She knew what it was.
There was a litter of wolf pups in the hollowed-out base
of the cedar tree.
No, Willa thought.
The pups were hungry and whimpering. They could sense
their mother drawing near.
No.
Willa’s heart wrenched when she heard the soft padding
of trotting footsteps.
No.
The mother wolf was coming down the path toward her den
of pups.
It was Luthien.
“N o, no, no,” she whispered desperately as she watched
the wolf trotting down the path of traps toward the den.
She knew now that the padaran hadn’t brought her here
just because he was pleased with her take. He had brought
here because he had sensed her pulling away from him, her
loyalty shifting. If she was to truly join him, if she was to
be the leader of his new band of jaetters, then he had to be
absolutely certain of her loyalty—not to the wolves or to
the forest or to the old ways of her grandmother—but to him
and only him.
“The day-folk are the enemy of our people,” he had told
her many times. “If they catch you in their valleys, they
will kill you. You’re only safe with the clan.”
Willa had nodded her head obediently whenever she heard
the padaran say these words. They went into her mind as
readily as water running down into a hole. There was a part
of her that found the familiarity of the words to be
reassuring, to know that what she’d known all her life was
true. There was a deep satisfaction and sense of well-being
in the comfort of knowing who to hate.
But the padaran had said, If they catch you, they will
kill you. And that was where the problem lay.
She kept remembering the man with the killing-stick who
had cornered her in his barn. He could have shot her again.
He could have hurt her or killed her in so many different
ways.
But he didn’t.
After that man saw who and what she was, he did not try
to harm her. He tried tohelp her.
She had been caught, and she hadn’t been killed.
But if the padaran was the god of the clan, how could he
be wrong?
And if he was wrong about this, then could he be wrong
about other things, things he’d been telling her all her
life?
Was it possible that her own thoughts and her own
feelings could be as good or even better than his?
Was it possible that she could be more Faeran in her
heart than the god of the Faeran clan?
It was clear that the padaran saw the mother wolf as
expendable, as worth the bounty he would earn from the
newcomers when he brought them her pelt. He had learned the
language of the day-folk, but he had forgotten the language
of the wolves. Did that make him a supreme being? Or a lesser
one?
As Willa looked at all the steel traps lying beneath the
leaves, and watched Luthien coming down the path toward her
den of pups, dismay poured through her. She knew she was
supposed to stay at the padaran’s side and watch the trap
spring. She knew she was supposed to watch the wolf die. She
knew that was what her padaran and her clan demanded of her.
And through all this, she kept remembering the look in her
mamaw’s eyes, the way her mamaw seemed to be thinking,
You’re blending in a way that I never taught you. But it’s
keeping us both alive.
But the thought of the steel trap crushing Luthien’s
leg, holding her there as she tried frantically to tear her
leg away and save her pups, was more than she could bear.
Willa grabbed the spear of power out of the startled
padaran’s hand and leapt to her feet. She felt the press of
the spear’s cold steel shaft in her grip and the weight of
it in the muscles of her arm. Then, as the mother wolf ran
toward her pups, Willa gathered all her strength, pulled back
her arm, and hurled the spear in the direction of the coming
wolf.
A s the spear soared through the air, it looked like it was
going to strike the wolf. Everything seemed to be moving so
slowly—the shocked look on the padaran’s face, the running
wolf, the spear arcing through the sky—it almost felt as if
she could stop it, reverse it, pull it back. But she knew she
couldn’t. She’d already grabbed the spear. She’d already
thrown it. It was far too late. There was nothing she could
do to change the spear’s path now. Or hers.
 “Luthien!” Willa shouted a warning.
The wolf dodged out of the way just in time and the spear
struck the trap. The trap snapped shut with a sudden jerk.
“The traps are all over the path!” Willa shouted to
Luthien in the old language. “Get your pups and flee!”
“You little fool!” the padaran shouted at her.
“Better a fool than a traitor!” Willa shouted back at
him in the old language.
“Kill her!” the padaran ordered his guards.
Lorcan thrust his spear straight at her chest. Willa
dodged the attack, but the other guard lunged forward and
clutched her with a bony hand. Willa flipped wildly upside
down, kicking like a panicking rabbit, and tore herself from
his grip as she hit the ground. Then she scurried rapidly
across the forest floor like a wiggling salamander, blending
as she went, Lorcan stabbing and then stabbing again, until
she sprang to her feet and ran.
She sprinted down the killing path where the traps had
been laid, her legs exploding with strength and propelling
her forward.
Her chest pumped with fast, shallow breaths as she ran
down the path, frantically avoiding the leaves next to the
marking stones. One wrong step and she’d suffer the pain of
the clamping teeth, and then feel the thrusts of her
enemies’ spears.
When she glanced behind her, she thought she had put a
good distance between her and her enemies, but the padaran
and his men were in close pursuit, charging after her. They
were fast runners. They were gaining on her. And she knew
they weren’t going to give up. There was no way to escape
them, no way to slow them down.
Then she had an idea.
She dove to the ground and draped her body over one of
the stones that marked the location of a trap. Then she
blended herself into the leaves.
 The padaran came running down the path. “I want her
dead!” he screamed to his guards as he ran. “Find her and
kill her!”
He saw only leaves.
The trap snapped shut with a sudden, violent jump. The
steel teeth cracked against the bone. The padaran shrieked in
pain and tried to leap away, but the trap had clamped onto
his leg, driving its teeth into his shin. He roared in agony
as he crumpled helplessly to the ground, his bloody hands
trying to pry the trap from his leg.
Lorcan and the other guard stopped to help the padaran,
pulling desperately at the closed trap, but it was jammed
into place.
“Get it off!” the padaran howled as they frantically
tried to pry it open with their hands.
Willa leapt to her feet and ran. When she glanced back,
she was expecting to see the padaran on the ground screaming
in misery, but she saw an even more startling sight. The
padaran’s skin had actually changed from radiant bronze to
splotched and wrinkled gray, like many of the oldest Faeran
in the clan. Slimy sweat dripped from all over his shriveled
face and arms and legs. A dark fluid oozed from the corner of
a clouded eye, and his hair hung loose and straggly around
his old, withered head.
As she ran down the trail back toward Dead Hollow, the
wailing screams of the padaran rose up behind her like the
screeches of a ghoul.
Willa didn’t understand what she’d just seen, but she
had to keep running. She didn’t look back again and she
didn’t slow down. Even after she had gone far enough to
leave the screams behind her, she kept going. She had harmed
the padaran. She had betrayed the clan. As soon as the guards
freed him from the trap, they’d return to the lair. The
padaran would instruct his stabbing guards and hissing
jaetters to rain violence upon her world. When the members of
the clan learned of her betrayal, the entire clan was going
to swarm against her. They’d destroy her den. They’d
destroy her. But worst of all, they’d destroy her
grandmother.
S he heard the screaming first. And then the shouts and
footfalls of jaetters and guards and other Faeran running all
through the Dead Hollow lair. It was as if they had already
heard about what she did, but that wasn’t possible. She had
run back to the lair and arrived before the padaran and his
guards. Something else had happened.
A new fear seized Willa’s chest. Her heart pounded as
she sprinted down the tunnel toward her den. When she came
through the door, she immediately screamed out and averted
her eyes from what she saw.
“Mamaw!” she cried as she collapsed to the floor a few
feet away from her, too frightened to get closer.
“Gredic came…” her grandmother rasped in the old
language, her voice ragged and weak, so low that it sounded
like the flow of a stream.
Willa couldn’t bear to raise her eyes and look at what
they had done to her, but she crawled and slid her hand
slowly forward across the floor, until she reached her
mamaw’s tiny hand and held it in hers.
“Tell me what to do to save you,” she whimpered,
pressing her face to the floor as she said the words, but she
already knew it was too late. She felt so powerless, like the
entire world was ending.
“You are the last, Willa,” her grandmother whispered.
“I don’t understand,” Willa said, crawling forward on
her belly, closer to her mamaw, as she gripped her mamaw’s
limp and slippery hand.
“It’s time for me to go,” her grandmother said.
“Please, Mamaw! Tell me what I need to do to save you!”
“Protect it, hold on to it,” her mamaw said. “It’s
the most precious thing we have.”
“I don’t understand. Protect what, Mamaw? How can I
protect anything?”
Willa clung to her mamaw with both her arms, curled up on
the floor, feeling the warm liquid oozing all around her.
“Please, Mamaw! Don’t leave me!” she cried.
“Naillic,” her mamaw whispered.
“What?” Willa asked. “What does it mean?”
“I didn’t want to tell you this until you were ready to
understand, but we are out of time. Do not say it out loud
until you wish to destroy everything and everyone, including
yourself. Knowing brings death.”
Willa didn’t understand. What was she talking about?
 Wild screams and angry shouts erupted someplace in the
lair above them. The wounded and enraged padaran and his
guards had arrived. Now everyone in the clan knew what she
had done. They knew she had hurt the padaran. There was no
doubt in her mind now: her clan was going to find her.
Her mamaw squeezed her hand. “You have to go, Willa. You
must leave this place. Follow the blood…”
The sound of shouting and rushing footsteps came pouring
down the tunnel. The hissing jaetters and the stabbing guards
were going to tear her apart.
When Willa finally gathered herself up, she didn’t look.
She didn’t look at her mamaw’s arms. She didn’t look at
her legs. She didn’t look at her chest, or her neck, or her
face. She looked only into her mamaw’s eyes.
As her mamaw looked back at her, Willa could see her
remembering all their time together, their sunlit mornings
walking among the trees of the forest, the eagles they had
seen together flying in the sky, their nights in their den
with the moonlight filtering down. And then her mamaw’s eyes
finally closed, and the long, last breath came from her body.
“Don’t leave me, Mamaw,” Willa sobbed as she pressed
herself to her grandmother. “Please don’t leave me!”
But she felt her mamaw’s spirit leave her body and rise
up through her own, into her arms and her legs, into her
chest and her heart. Where does a spirit go? Where does the
new world begin? Into the boughs of the trees? Into the stone
of the earth? Into the flow of the river? Into the ether of
the air? It passes from one person to another, each into the
other.
All Willa could do was cling to her mamaw and breathe.
Willa heard the jaetters and the guards coming down
through the tunnels that led to the den, at least fifty of
them, hissing and gnashing their teeth, brandishing clubs and
their sticks and their sharpened spears.
All she could do was breathe.
 She could weave herself into one of the walls and hide,
but they’d block off the door, close in the room, and stab
with their spears until they found her.
All she could do was breathe.
The coming mob was filled with a screeching violence more
terrible than anything she had ever heard.
All she could do was breathe.
She was trapped.
There was no way out.
Then she looked down at the woven-stick floor.
Follow the blood.
W illa reached down and touched the woven-stick floor with the
tips of her bare fingers, feeling the woody texture of it.
Living here in this room with her grandmother, she had
crawled on this floor, walked on this floor, grown up on this
floor. She had never thought of it as anything other than a
floor. Unmoving. Unmovable.
But now, her hands trembling and her eyes blurry with
tears, she gripped one of the sticks, broke it, and pulled it
away.
Then she pulled out another and another.
Soon she was tearing the sticks away as fast as she
could, scratching at the floor like a clawing animal. Down on
her hands and knees, she bit at the sticks with her teeth,
biting them away, ripping at the sticks with her hands. Her
fingertips bled. Her fingernails tore. But it didn’t matter.
She had to keep clawing.
As soon as she made the hole large enough to fit through,
she scurried down inside and tucked herself below. But she
couldn’t leave a gaping hole in the floor. Gredic and the
other jaetters would follow right after her.
She pressed her fingers against the stick-frayed edge of
the hole. If the sticks had still been green and alive, she
could use her woodcraft to re-intertwine them, but these
sticks had been dead for a hundred years. There was no life
in them, no moisture, no soul.
I don’t want to do it, she thought. Not here, not like
this. Not ever!
But the truth was, her mamaw had taught her what she
needed to do. Her mamaw had shown her how to inspirit the
dead when she was seven. But Willa had frightened herself so
badly she never did it again.
But you have to, Willa. You have to escape this place!
She pressed her bleeding fingers to the sticks and began
to push them and pull them into motion, infusing them with
her own life. The moisture and blood of her fingers seeped
into them. She felt the dead sticks sucking the spirit and
nutrients from her body, white, cold pain tearing through the
skin of her fingers, then radiating up into her hands. She
pulled in a sudden breath of revulsion when the sticks
started creaking and cracking with their own twisting,
crawling movements like writhing black worms. The sticks were
pulling her life out through her pulsing fingertips, draining
her of the inner forces that kept her alive, like roots
pulling water from the ground. Finally, she yanked her
fingers away before it was too late. A few seconds too long,
and she’d be dead.
Asking the living trees to help her cross a river felt as
natural to her as having a conversation with old friends, but
bringing back the dead was woodcraft in its darkest form. And
she knew it would leave her a dried husk if she wasn’t
careful.
Putting her dry, skin-cracked, ice-cold fingers into her
mouth to warm them, she looked up at the place where the hole
had been and saw that she had succeeded in weaving the sticks
together and closing the hole.
Blending her colors, whispering with wolves, running
through the limbs of the tallest trees—her grandmother had
taught her so many things, the brightest and the darkest lore
of the forest. She couldn’t even imagine living without her
mamaw. What was she going to do? Where was she going to go?
As she crept beneath the now-closed-in woven-stick floor,
she heard the footsteps of the guards and jaetters storming
into the room above.
She crawled down into the red-stained branches below,
down into the dripping underworld of Dead Hollow, down past
the whitened bones of the earth, into the darkness of a
rocky, cavelike void until she found the cold, wet embrace of
the stream that ran beneath the lair. The rocks all around
her were streaked with black and red, cracked with the
ancient movement of the mountain, and littered with the white
broken sticks of hundreds of Faeran souls. They were the ones
who had come before her. The ones who had stood. The ones who
had spoken. They were the shattered twins, and the beaten
down, and the silenced.Knowing brings death. But the cold
swept around her, and lifted her, and carried her away.
The river was water, was blood, was all that had come
before. As she floated with the current, she began to see
horrific images in her mind, images of Gredic and the other
jaetters pouring through the labyrinth and storming into her
grandmother’s room, images of her mother, father, and sister
fleeing through the forest from dark figures with long
spears, and images of the padaran writhing on the ground in
bloody anguish with his leg in the trap, his face turning
slimy gray—a thousand images that she could not bear.
She did not move her arms or legs, or turn her body. She
drifted on her back, gazing up into the darkness of the cave.
Far above her head, the footsteps of her swarming clan fell
like shadows across the weaves of the sticks, like dark
locusts flying across a reddened black sky. And the sky was
blood. The sky was time. The sky was the past.
“Good-bye, Mamaw,” she cried, feeling the ache of it
deep down in her chest.
She floated with nothing but sadness, no will to move or
live. She just let herself be carried by the blood of the
earth, with no want or desire or need, other than to go back,
to go back in time, to let them steal her satchel if that was
what they wanted, to stay crumpled on the floor of the great
hall with her voice silent and her eyes cast down, and more
than anything, out in that forest, to un-throw that spear.
But she knew a river couldn’t go back, and she had no
will to fight it. She felt nothing but numb as the lair of
Dead Hollow slipped into the distance behind her.
As she floated on the river, time had no meaning. No
minutes or hours. There was only the movement of the water.
All else in the world was still and did not exist. All else
was ground. But she was moving, flowing with the sweep of the
water that carried her.
And there was no time.
H er body slipped into an eddy of the river and bumped against
the bank. She had passed through the underworld of the lair
and into the living forest, but the thickness of the tree
branches above her created a dark and shadowed world with no
moon or stars.
She felt the touch of many small, wet hands with tiny
fingers grasping at the skin of her bare arms and legs.
Creatures with thick dark brown fur and large, flat, scaly
tails surrounded her, their wide teeth chattering as they
worked.
They dragged her body from the stream and partway up onto
the earth.
She lay there on the bank of the river for a long time,
too destroyed inside to move.
S he woke to the growls of hunger stirring in her stomach. Her
whole body hurt with a dull aching pain.
When she looked up through the canopy of the trees and
saw the slanting rays of the setting sun filtering through
the branches, she realized that she must have been lying
there for many hours, through both the night and the day.
The water of the stream, which had been the color of
blood beneath the lair, was clear now, sliding along a
winding bed of smooth, round, pale gray stones through a
thick forest of old trees, twisted and dark, with wet
glistening branches hanging down from above and blackened
roots twisting across the wet ground below.
As she slowly began to remember everything that had
happened, she felt a pain in her heart unlike anything she
had ever felt before, an aching, throbbing wound that sucked
down into her soul so deep that it felt as if she was going
to stop breathing if she didn’t force her chest to keep
rising and falling. She would never hear her grandmother’s
voice again, never feel her touch. She would never explore
another forest dell with her, or look into her grandmother’s
eyes.
“Gwen-elen den ulna, Mamaw,” she said.Wherever you’re
going, Mamaw, may you walk among trees.
As she said these last words to her mamaw, she realized
that not only would she never see her grandmother again, she
would never again hear the Faeran language.
Willa laid her head back down in the black, soft, wet
dirt that lived between the roots of the trees near the side
of the river, and she shut her eyes.
There was a numbness in the darkness that gave her a sort
of comfort that the sight of the world did not. The world was
too painful, too empty, too full of thoughts to endure.
In the swarming clan of the padaran, love and family had
become the smallest and rarest of leaves, struggling to
survive, and now it felt as if the last of those leaves had
withered and died. Her mother and father were gone, memories
long passed. Alliw was gone, nothing but a handprint of paint
on an echoing wall that she would never see again. And now
her mamaw was gone, like the song of the morning birds had
disappeared. It felt as if she were the only one still living
in the world.
There was no one left to fill the quiet or hear her
voice, no one left to warm her shoulder or touch her hand, no
one left to forage with, or sleep with in their den, or tell
her stories to, or learn from. It felt as if the spirit deep
within her living body were nothing but a bleeding wound, and
soon she would die.
When she awoke a few hours later, she heard the delicate
sound of small, soft footsteps moving slowly toward her.
She opened her eyes to see a doe and a little spotted
fawn stepping carefully through the fine grass that grew
along the edge of the stream, their tiny hooves making no
more noise than a breath as they touched the ground.
The fawn had beautiful tawny fur with white spots that
helped her stay hidden in the forest and the fields—not that
different from her own camouflage, except that the fawn’s
took a season to change.
The mother deer twitched her ears this way and that as
she scanned the area for danger. But there was no danger.
Only Willa.
While she was sleeping, Willa’s skin had naturally
turned as black and brown as the stream bank, with the color
and texture of roots running along her arms and legs and
chest. The mother deer could smell her and see her there,
lying on the ground beside the stream, but Willa’s presence
did not alarm her.
Willa watched as the mother deer leaned down and drank
from the stream, but the little fawn standing beside her
stared at Willa, as if she wasn’t sure what she was.
The mother deer nudged the fawn, reminding her to drink.
The fawn leaned down on splayed shaky legs, lowered her
head, and drank a little bit from the stream, but then
quickly raised her head again and stared at Willa.
There was something in the fawn’s eyes, not just the
curiosity that Willa expected, but something else as well.
The fawn seemed to sense that she was upset, that she’d been
crying…that she needed help.
Uncertain what the fawn was going to do, Willa didn’t
move.
 Finally, with its nose twitching and its eyes blinking,
the fawn took a few uncertain steps toward her, and then
stopped.
“Eee na nin,” It’s all right
Willa said, which meant
but had a gentler sound to it.
Fawns were sensitive little creatures. The slightest
movement or the faintest whisper of the wrong word would send
a fawn running. For the fawn to feel safe enough to come to
her, Willa had to slow her breathing and her heartbeat. She
had to find the stillness in her body and in her soul. She
focused her mind on her heart, and brought it down slower and
slower, until it was beating just once every few seconds.
The fawn’s little white tail twitched nervously as she
slowly made her way closer, her skinny little body suspended
on her tremulous, overly long legs, and her dainty black
hooves.
The fawn came very close, studied Willa for several
seconds, then folded her legs, and curled up into a little
spotted ball in the place between Willa’s folded legs and
her chest.
Willa felt the soft warmth of the fawn’s silky fur
against her skin, the minute movement of the fawn’s gentle
breaths, and the beat of her tiny heart. Willa slowly let the
blood begin to flow through her heart again until her
heartbeat matched the fawn’s. While the mother deer fed on
the nearby grass and watched over them, Willa and the fawn
fell quietly asleep.
When Willa woke in the middle of the night, the mother
deer was still feeding a short distance away, as if grateful
to have a few moments on her own while she knew her fawn was
safe. Willa, without disturbing the fawn, slowly reached out
and grasped some of the fine, thin grass at the edge of the
stream. It tasted wet and sweet in her mouth.
The presence of the mother deer feeding nearby, and the
little sleeping fawn in the bend of her body, felt like a
salve to her hidden wounds, as if one of the leaves from her
mamaw’s little tree had begun to touch her soul.
As she lay there in the darkness, she noticed a tiny
point of glowing blue light hovering a few inches off the
ground on the other side of the stream. Just as she turned
toward it, it went dark and disappeared.
She thought she must have imagined it, but then another
blue light appeared a few feet away from her, and then
another farther out in the trees. A moment later, hundreds of
tiny blue lights lit up the darkness around her, gliding
slowly a few inches off the ground on both sides of the
stream and all through the forest, setting the nighttime
world aglow with steady, soft blue light.
Despite the sadness in her heart, Willa smiled. They were
the blue ghost fireflies that her mamaw had shown her and
Alliw years before. They were some of the rarest creatures in
the world. These beautiful blue spirits appeared only in
certain glens hidden deep in the forest on particular
mountains, and only for a few moments on a few nights each
year.
It was as if her mamaw had brought them out tonight just
for her, to remind her of who she had been, and who she still
remained.
And now, as Willa sat alone with the blue ghosts floating
gently around her, their wandering lines of soft glowing
light became a dance, with the humming of the forest insects
and the babbling of the stream their music, and her heart
filling with awe.
She slowly came to the realization that despite
everything that had happened in her life, the forest wasn’t
dead. The forest was still alive. And she was alive within
it, her heart still beating.
She knew that she had betrayed her clan. And she had
betrayed the padaran. But more than that, she realized,he
had betrayed her.
 She didn’t understand who or what the padaran was, or
how he became the god of the clan, but he had betrayed the…
What had he betrayed? The Faeran ways? But what were those
ways in a world that moved like a river changing from season
to season, storm to storm? She didn’t know.
What she did know was that he had betrayed her her
, ways,
her heart. He had trapped and killed the animals of the
forest. He had captured and imprisoned humans. He had sent
his jaetters to kill her mamaw, to silence the last of the
ancient whisperers.
Willa looked around her at the forest. She had followed
the padaran loyally all her life. She had idolized him,
struggled for him, stole for him, all for him, all for the
clan. There is no I, only we.
But deep down, what kind of Faeran was he? What kind of
Faeran could do these things that he had done? She didn’t
know. What she wondered now was what kind of Faeran she was
going to become.
She slowly climbed up onto her feet. She looked down the
path of the stream as it meandered between the trunks of the
great trees and disappeared in the distance. She gazed at the
blue-glowing mist curling through the branches that reached
toward the sky. And then she looked up toward the slope of
the mountain.
The forests of the Great Smoky Mountain, she thought. The
breath of life. My life. My grandmother’s life. Food and
water. Light and darkness. The trees, the animals, the flow
of the river, the cut of the rocks, and all the world around
me.
The padaran had said that she would be cast out into the
world on her own, and that she could not survive. But she
could survive.
She knew how to forage for food. She knew the ways of the
forest animals. She knew the spirit of the world.
I’ll live like the Faeran of old.
 And maybe there were other places she could go, places
she’d never been before, places she couldn’t even imagine.
And maybe there were other people out here. Maybe there were
other clans, places she could find warmth and shelter when
winter came.
Standing there in the forest on her own, she didn’t feel
strong. And she didn’t feel happy. But she finally felt as
if she could go on.
She said farewell to the little fawn and the mother deer
and she started walking. She wasn’t sure it was even
possible, but she decided that she was going to try to climb
to the top of the Great Mountain and look out at the world in
which she lived.
S he didn’t know exactly why she was doing it. She just
wanted to climb, to feel the motion of it in her body.
It was an easy walk up the forested slope at first,
eating the red berries of the mountain ash along the way.
Then it became much rockier and steeper, and the difficulty
of it drove her to keep going. The muscles in her arms and
legs burned. The cold mountain air pushed through her lungs.
As she pulled herself up the side of the mountain, the
sharpness of the jagged rock tore at the bare skin of her
hands. She didn’t know why, but she liked the sharp,
tangible, physical pain of it. The blowing wind pulled tears
from her eyes.
Where the ground became too steep, she grabbed the roots
and branches of the rhododendron like they were the rungs of
a homesteader’s ladder. When she spotted blackberries
growing in the mountainside thickets, she stuffed some in her
mouth. She drank from the little rivulets of water that
dripped down the crevices of the rock past profusions of lush
ferns.
With its steep rocky slopes, the mountain had always told
people that it didn’t want to be climbed, but she couldn’t
help but think that today it was providing for her along the
way.
She followed the rocky streambeds that snaked up between
the spurs of the mountain, up through the boulders and the
old, weathered trees torn and twisted by the wind. She
climbed hand over hand, up through the silent, craggy stone
of ancient times.
Her heart worked painfully in her chest. Her lungs
dragged for air. But she kept going. She wanted nothing now
but for the pain in her body, and the loneliness in her soul,
to block out what lay behind her.
She came into an area of thick fog where the Great
Mountain often hid its head when it was sleeping, its
dreaming mists floating across its smoky peak. But then she
realized that it wasn’t just the normal fog she was used to
down in Dead Hollow and the valleys below. She was so high up
that she was actually inside a cloud as it moved across the
sky. She felt the cool touch of the cloud’s tiny droplets on
her cheeks as she climbed, and she tasted the sweetness of it
on her tongue.
Way up in the sky now, the air had chilled, but her body
was sweating despite the cold. Her muscles ached. Her fingers
bled. Blisters pained her feet. But she kept climbing,
pushing, driving her mamaw’s death from her body. Reaching
and grabbing and pulling and climbing, up and up and up she
went. She wanted to get to the top of the mountain and see
the entirety of the world.
And then suddenly there was nothing more to grab. She was
surrounded by a dense stand of giant fir trees, with trunks
thicker than her outstretched arms, but there was no higher
ground.
She frowned in confusion. At first she thought she must
have veered off course and reached a false peak, and that the
real mountain was still above her—for the mountain had
always been above her—but then she realized where she was.
She had done it. She had reached the peak of the Great
Mountain for the first time in her life.
Unable to see through the foliage around her, she went
over to the thickest and tallest of the giant fir trees. She
felt unusually nervous about approaching it. Without her
mamaw gone from the world, did her own powers still work?
Could she still speak to the trees? Would they still listen?
Could she still learn and grow without her teacher? Or had
all the magic of the world disappeared?
“I’m hoping you can help me get a little higher, my
friend,” she said softly in the old language, and she
started climbing.
Her small, clawed fingers and her gripping toes clung
easily to the rough bark of the colossal tree as she climbed,
almost as if the two of them—her and this age-old tree—had
grown up to be part of one another’s lives. When she
struggled or almost lost her grip, the tree lifted a branch
or intertwined a vine around her hand to help her. She
climbed and climbed, reaching for one branch after another,
up and up through the mist-dripping boughs of the tree, until
she came to the highest branches, her body finally swaying
gently in the breeze.
She looked out from her eagle perch with excitement, but
all she could see was the gray mist of the clouds rolling all
around her. She was surrounded by them, inside them. But the
clouds weren’t just sitting still, blocking her sight, they
were changing, rolling and turning, opening and closing the
space around her, as if the Great Mountain was saying,Just
wait a moment, and I will show you…
As the clouds began to clear, she spotted a patch of sky
and the gleam of sunlight. She caught a glimpse of a forested
ridge not too far away, and then a peak a little farther out.
And then, as the clouds opened up, she began to see a vast
world of rolling green mountains and shadowed valleys. Golden
rays poured through the openings in the clouds and cast their
light across the land.
She turned one way and then another, gazing out at the
world—mountain ranges in every direction for as far as she
could see. The forested slopes of the closest mountains lay
around her with the evergreen canopy of the trees. The
mountain ridges farther on were darker green in color, and
the ones beyond those a deep blue, and beyond those a lighter
blue, mountains so far away that they seemed to turn into the
sky, layer upon layer of mountains, each one’s shade of
green and blue blending into the next, hundreds of colors for
which humans had no names. It was the most beautiful thing
she had ever seen.
She squinted her eyes and looked out toward the edge of
the world, but beyond the distant mountains, all she could
see were more mountains.
Then she remembered something that had happened the year
before. She had been creeping through the forest near Cades
Cove, a quiet valley where a community of homesteaders lived,
when she overheard two day-folk men talking as oxen pulled
their carriage down the road.
“Well, ya know,” one of the men had said, “back in the
olden days, them folk reckoned the earth was flat.”
“I can’t see how they thought that,” said his friend.
“Even back then, I reckon they knew the earth was round.
Look at the shadow cast on the moon.”
 But standing on top of the Great Mountain at this moment,
Willa knew that the day-folk men were wrong. The earth was
neither flat nor round. It was mountains. It was jagged rocks
and steep ravines, treeless windy ridges and shaded wooded
glens, streams winding through hidden forest realms, and
high, rounded peaks that looked out across the world—and
there, too, only mountains. How could it be any other way?
she thought. How could the trees and the mountains ever end?
It would cease to be the world.
She remembered floating through the underworld of Dead
Hollow, thinking about the padaran, about the way of the
Faeran and what that meant. The Faeran ways and the human
ways. The us and thethem. The we I
and the . Maybe there
wasn’t just one way, but many. The earth wasn’t flat or
round. It was mountains.
As she gazed across the sky, she spotted something out of
the corner of her eye and turned toward it. It was just a
speck at first, very distant, but as it came closer she soon
realized that it was a hawk soaring on the currents of air
that flowed like rivers above the ridges of the mountains.
With the gentle tilt of its wings, the hawk steered its
way through the sky. It was coming very close, and then her
heart leapt a little when it glided right past her. For the
first time in her life, she wasn’t looking up
at a hawk, but
down at it. And as the hawk flew by, it tilted its head and
looked up at her, as if surprised to see her there up on top
of the world.
As the hawk soared on and looked back out across his
aerial domain, she wondered again about what the men had said
about the shape of the earth. The hawk knows, she thought. He
knows the air. He knows the earth. He can see it all up here.
She gazed out across the mountainous world, trying to imagine
what was out there, trying to imagine where she could go.
As the mist began to slowly roll back in, it was as if
the mountain was gently saying,You’ve had enough now,
little one. It’s time for you to go…
 She knew the mountain was used to living in the mist and
only seldom showed its true self, and she was grateful that
it had decided to show itself to her.
As the incoming clouds formed along the ridges, she
watched the mist roll down the sides of the Great Mountain
into the valleys below. She thought about all the living
creatures down there, the wolves in their dens and the bears
by the lake, the mother deer and her fawn, the Faeran in
their twisted lair, and the Cherokee tending their farms, and
the homesteaders in their log cabins, and the newcomers with
their iron machines, all coming together, the mist of the
mountain, the breath of their world, providing life to them
all.
An unusual scent touched her nostrils. Frowning, she
sniffed the air, and then turned and scanned.
She wished she could ask the hawk what he could see,
because she knew his eyes were far better than her own, but
he was long on his way.
Then she spotted what looked like a thin line of gray
mist floating up from a particular spot in the distance. But
it wasn’t mist. It was a trail of smoke rising from one of
the valleys far below her.
She knew that particular valley well, with its coves of
giant hemlocks, towering pines, and black walnut trees—old
friends who had shaded her from the summer sun while they
listened to her singing her Faeran songs of old.
She knew it must be a great outpouring of smoke for her
to be able to see it from this distance. It was too much
smoke to be the stone-steep breath of a day-folk lair. And
too narrow to be the fire that consumes the world.
A tight and sickening feeling crept slowly into her chest
as she stared toward the mysterious smoke.
A bright flash lit the spot. An area of trees
disintegrated. And the trees around it collapsed to the
ground, one after the other, like they were being eaten by a
giant beast. A great eruption of smoke and debris rose up
into the air.
And then the sound of it hit her in the chest, like a
crack of thunder after a bolt of lightning. The booming sound
flew across the sky and echoed off the mountains behind her.
A thick plume of black smoke rose up from where the trees
had been destroyed. Even from this great distance, she could
hear their screaming, their twisting, burning cries as their
ancient spirits came crashing to the ground.
“Anakanasha,” she cried out in anguish, her heart
aching for the wounded and murdered trees, and all the birds
and animals that lived among them. The pain welled up in her
chest so quickly and with such powerful force that it sucked
her breath away. The tears burned in her eyes as she gazed
toward the devastation.
What vicious force had caused such terrible destruction?
W illa ran across the rocky terrain, leaping from one jagged
edge to the next, diving headlong through thickets of
underbrush, and sprinting through the groves of the tall,
growing trees, pushed on by the desperate hope that she might
be able to help some of the animals that had been hurt by the
destruction she’d seen from the mountaintop. But she had
miles to go. She knew that her camouflage wouldn’t protect
her when she was traversing long distances like this. An
onlooker would see a flash of movement and a blur of color as
her skin changed from one rocky gray or leafy green texture
to the next. It would leave her vulnerable to attack, but she
had to find out what had happened.
Exhausted from running, she slowed to catch her breath
when she reached Moss Hollow, a deep ravine dark with the
green shadows of its protecting trees where thin runnels of
water trickled through the mossy rocks and gathered into a
stream. It was the place where the valley’s river was
forever being born.
After taking a quick drink, she continued on.
She followed the winding path of the young river until
she arrived at the Three Forks, where several streams came
together to become a true and powerful river with a life and
soul of its own.
From here, she ran along the rocky bank as the great
river began finding its own way and making its own decisions,
moving boulders and carving through the earth, getting
stronger and deeper as all the streams around it joined its
cause, mile after mile, winding through the forest until it
was strong and unstoppable, wearing down the mountains
through which it flowed. She had seen with her eyes and
learned in her soul that where a river is born, the earth
shapes its path. But where the river grows up, it begins, in
turn, to shape the earth.
When she finally reached the area where she had seen the
destruction, she split off from the river and headed west
into the forest. The sound of many footsteps scuffling
through the leaves touched her ears. Then came the hushed
whispers of muffled voices. A group of humans was coming her
way. She ducked down into the bushes to hide.
A dozen Cherokee families were moving quickly and quietly
through the forest. They were breathing heavily, their simple
cotton clothing soiled and disheveled, and their faces tense
with white-eyed fear as they glanced repeatedly behind them.
Many of the Cherokee carried sacks and other supplies slung
over their shoulders, as if they had hurriedly gathered their
belongings from their homes and fled. One woman carried her
baby wrapped in a blanket on her back. The men were bleeding
from recent wounds and their faces were smudged with black
marks.
She had often seen Cherokee walking on the gravel roads
that connected the area’s towns, and she’d seen them
trading peacefully with the homesteaders, but she’d never
seen them running through the underbrush like this before.
They seemed to be fleeing some sort of danger, but they were
also scanning ahead and looking all around as if they were
searching for something they had lost.
Then she noticed that other than the one baby on the
mother’s back, there didn’t appear to be any other children
among them. Was that what they were looking for? Had they
lost children?
And then, at the rear of the group, following behind all
the others, she spotted one boy just coming into view. He was
a lean, bare-chested boy a few years older than her. He had
long black hair and the dark-striped markings of his tribe on
his face and arms. He definitely wasn’t from the same clan
as these other Cherokee, but he was carrying one of their
girls in his arms, and her hair was matted with blood.
He turned and looked into the distance behind him, his
face racked with worry. Then he gazed out into the forest, as
He’s not just looking for
if hoping to see something there.
their enemy, she thought.He’s been separated from someone
he loves.
She wondered if this Cherokee boy knew the younger boy
that she’d met in the prison beneath the lair, but she
didn’t think so. There was something very different about
this boy. He seemed so strong and fierce of heart, and as he
walked across the leaves of the forest, his footsteps made
only the slightest, most muffled sound. She could smell the
other Cherokee men and women just like she could smell the
homesteaders, for they were human beings like any others. She
knew it was impossible, but when this odd boy walked past her
hiding spot in the bushes, his scent reminded her of
something very specific:mountain lion .
At that moment, the boy abruptly stopped, turned, and
looked right in her direction. His dark brown eyes scanned
the forest intently.
Holding her breath, Willa wove herself deeper into the
colors and texture of the woods and remained perfectly still.
The boy peered into the area she was hiding, like he knew
she was there. But she could hold her breath for a long time
if she had to. When it came to staying still, no one could
outlast her. She had learned patience from the trees.
The shock of a booming explosion tore through the forest,
rattling the leaves and shaking the ground. Flocks of
startled birds flew up. Small animals darted for cover. The
ricocheting sound echoed across the walls of the nearby
ravines.
Willa ducked down with the Cherokee, cowering to the
ground, white-cold fear surging through her body. She had
never felt or heard such a deafening sound, one that slammed
through her and everything around her. She was left lying on
the ground, her lungs panting, and her ears ringing with a
high-pitched whine.
“Everybody get up!” the Cherokee boy called to the
others. “Keep moving!”
Willa climbed back up onto her feet. Just over the
nearest ridge, a large plume of black smoke furled up into
the sky. As the small band of Cherokee hurried away in the
opposite direction, she went toward the smoke.
A s Willa ran through the forest, an eerie gray smoke drifted
through the trees. The smell of scorched wood hung in the
air, tinged with a sharpness that reminded her of the blast
of a killing-stick.
And then, as she pushed forward through the haze,
something even worse invaded her nostrils: the sickening odor
of recently cut trees. The overwhelming stench of hacked
limbs, severed trunks, and spilled sap filled the air.
 She came to a ledge where the ground had been broken to
pieces by a powerful violence, with loose rocks and dirt
crumbling down a cliff at her feet. As she looked out from
the edge, a shocking sight opened up before her eyes.
The world was gone.
A vast area of the forest had been cut down and dragged
away. All the trees for as far as she could see had been
murdered, leaving nothing but a slashed clearing with
thousands of stumps in a field of damaged earth, broken
branches, and piles of sawdust.
Willa cried out at the sight of it. The trees had all
been killed! What kind of people would do this? Why would
they destroy the forest?
There were hundreds of men at work, savaging the trees at
the edge of the forest. She watched in horror as two of them
pulled a six-foot-long, jagged-edged saw back and forth
through a living sugar maple tree, the sharp steel teeth
ripping through the flesh of the trunk as sap oozed from the
wound.
The murderers weren’t the homesteaders or the Cherokee
that she’d seen from a distance all her life. They were the
humans that her mamaw and the padaran had called the
newcomers. Now she saw why they had come to her forests.
“Timber!” the men shouted to their fellow killers as
the majestic tree came crashing down to the ground. Then a
dozen other men fell upon the tree with axes and hacked away
at its limbs.
Trees she had known all her life—tulip poplar, black
walnut, white oak, red maple—fell one after the other to the
men’s saws and axes. A few of these elder souls had lived
their lives in these mountain coves for more than three
hundred years, others for fifty or a hundred, but all of them
were being cut down in a matter of hours.
Willa felt a rumbling in the earth beneath her feet and
she heard a loud rushing sound. She turned to see a giant,
black machine rolling on long steel rails that the men had
laid across the earth. Even as distant as it was, the sound
of the machine filled her chest and shook her body. Hot,
spitting white steam poured out of the machine’s stack,
breathing heavy, chugging breaths as it pumped along the
tracks. Sweating men riding atop the beast shoveled black
coal into its burning belly.
When the machine reached the cutting area, crews of men
used sweating, frightened, chain-enslaved horses to drag
thick cables up the mountainsides and hook them onto the
fallen trees. Then a second massive, belching steam engine
mounted on the back of the moving beast dragged the bodies of
the trees toward it, like a long-legged spider slowly pulling
in its prey. A dangling, steam-driven boom swung out over the
ground, grabbed the logs with huge claws, and lifted them
onto the rolling beast’s back.
The crews cut down the living, dragged in the dead, and
stacked the carcasses one atop the other. She tried to
imagine what they were doing with them all. She knew that
they cut up the bodies of the trees to make their lairs and
their tools and their weapons, their carriages and their toys
and the cribs for their babies, but how many of the day-folk
could there be in the world for them to destroy an entire
area of forest?
A crew of men with shovels and wheelbarrows, spikes and
hammers, approached the area where Willa was standing. They
began digging and hammering away at the disturbed earth
exposed by the explosions. They appeared to be laying steel
tracks into a new area of the forest, establishing the course
for the cutters to come with their machines. Where a rocky
ridge or steep terrain thwarted their progress, they stacked
small piles of red sticks and lit a long white vine on fire.
They had blasted cavities into the sides of living mountains,
broken apart large rock heads, and filled in the ravines of
the river—flattening the mountainous land so that the black,
steam-belching machine could come. Some of the fires from the
explosions still burned nearby, great plumes of black smoke
rising up into the air.That’s what I saw from the mountain,
she thought.
Unable to take any more of the devastation into her mind,
she pulled back into the forest and stumbled away. It felt
like someone had ripped a hole in her heart.
Saddened and disoriented, Willa found herself walking
through an area of the forest that had been badly damaged by
the recent explosion. The trunks of the trees were broken in
half, their insides shattered, and their severed branches
left to die on the forest floor. The bodies of dead birds lay
strewn across the ground—blue jays and flycatchers,
chickadees and woodpeckers—their feathers shredded and their
necks broken. The carcass of a small red fox lay with its
legs bent and its body twisted. She had come to the area of
the destruction to help in any way she could, but it was too
late. The fox’s spirit was gone. The animals in this area
were all dead. It left her feeling so hopeless, so powerless
to do anything.
The disturbed earth beneath her feet suddenly gave way.
She lost her footing as the soil collapsed around her. She
found herself sliding down into the ravine of the dammed-up
river, jammed with crisscrossing trunks and scorched trees
from the explosion. She grabbed frantically at the dirt
around her, but she couldn’t stop her fall. She was headed
straight toward the churning rapids pouring through the
logjam. Despite all that the humans had done, the river would
not be stopped. Every muscle in her body bunched with panic.
She was terrified that she’d get sucked into the powerful
currents and pinned against a log. She lunged out, grabbed
hold of a branch, and held on, clinging to the side of the
ravine, just a few feet above the swirling water.
That was when she saw it.
It was one of the largest animals she had ever seen. But
it looked so small with its body crushed beneath the trunk of
a tree. It was completely exhausted, and badly wounded,
pinned half in and half out of the gushing water, its claws
sunk deep into the bark of a tree, holding on with the last
of its strength. It was seconds from drowning. The animal had
jet-black fur and a long black tail, and its bright yellow
eyes were staring straight at her.
T he loose dirt crumbled beneath her feet as Willa plunged
down the wall of the ravine toward the dark, churning current
of the logjammed river. In a flailing, desperate leap, she
flung herself out at an exposed root and clung to it, and
then willed the living root to intertwine around her wrists
and hold her in place. She hung there now, just above the
dangerous currents. And trapped just a few feet away from
her, there was a female mountain lion, a panther, as black as
night, unlike any she had ever seen before.
She knew a predator like that could kill with a single
swipe of her claws, but it didn’t seem like the cat was
going to attack, or was even able to. The panther’s back was
bent beneath the trunk of a fallen tree, and her bloody
wounds looked excruciating. The cat’s mouth was drawn up
into a snarl, her whiskers trembling in pain. The panther
growled repeatedly as she sunk her claws into the trunk she
was pinned against and tried to pull herself free.
Willa had overheard the homesteaders and the Cherokee
telling stories around their campfires about the Ghost of the
Forest, and her grandmother had described these mythical
beasts to her as well, but she never thought she’d actually
see one with her own eyes.
She wanted to help the animal, but she was hanging on to
the ravine wall by a spindly tree root, and she was terrified
to go anywhere near the cat’s sharp claws and deadly teeth.
Panthers were one of the wildest, most vicious animals of the
forest. She couldn’t imagine how she could get any closer to
her.
As the powerful flow of the river gushed through the
narrow chute of the ravine, it pushed the tangle of massive
trees that had jammed up all around them, rocking it back and
forth. She could hear the logjam creaking and groaning like
it was going to give way at any moment.
She had to get herself out of this ravine or she was
going to get washed away when the river broke through. And
she didn’t have the strength to drag a panther out from
under a fallen tree or lift a trunk from a panther’s back.
When she heard the loud, jeering call of the blue jays in
the trees at the top of the ravine, she knew it wasn’t just
birdsong. It was a warning. A warning to her in particular.
Some sort of new danger was approaching. When she focused her
ears on the area above her, she heard voices and footsteps at
the top of the ravine. They were coming her way.
 Expecting it to be a group of loggers with their axes,
Willa pressed herself close to the wall and tried to blend,
but dangling from the root, she couldn’t stay still enough
to hide herself very well.
Then she saw them. It wasn’t the loggers, but Faeran.
Gredic, Ciderg, Kearnin, and a band of other jaetters
were coming, wielding not just the sticks they had before,
but sharpened spears now, ready to kill the animals of the
forest and bring their pelts back to the padaran. The group
of them were scavenging along the path of the destroyed
ravine. They would soon discover the trapped panther just as
she had.
Her grandmother had told her that one of the reasons that
black panthers were considered magical was because they were
so rare and elusive—very few people had ever seen one. Willa
knew that the panther’s black fur pelt would be highly
valuable, far more valuable than a wolf pelt or coins or
silver jewelry or anything else the jaetters might hope to
get their hands on. When they saw the trapped and struggling
panther, they would laugh with pleasure and chatter their
teeth, then rush forward and stab her with their spears until
she was dead.
Willa couldn’t stand the thought of it.
When she looked again at the panther, she could see the
desperation blazing in her yellow eyes. And she could see the
panther heard the coming jaetters and understood the danger.
Willa’s heart filled with a desperate sort of foolish
courage. She willed the roots holding her in place to unfurl
from her hands. Then she scrambled across the crumbling wall
of the ravine to get closer to the panther. The panther’s
heavy, laboring breaths moved great rushes of air in and out
of her lungs. Her grinding claws gripped the bark of the tree
trunk she was crushed against.
Willa thought she could make it over to the panther, but
then the dirt beneath her feet and hands gave way. She slid
down the slope of the ravine and splashed into the river. She
reached out and grabbed the branches of the tree to keep from
getting swept away, but the branches snapped in her hand as
the rushing water pulled her under.
She had been trying to help, but now she was caught in
the same vortex of swirling current as the panther. They were
going to drown together.
Then something large and alive brushed past her leg under
the water. She yelped in fear and scrambled up onto the bank
of the river as fast as she could.
On the ridge above her, Gredic and Ciderg were shouting.
They’d spotted the panther. And they had spotted her.
A s the jaetters on the ridge looked for a way down the wall
of the ravine, Willa knew she had to help the panther. But
how? It seemed as if something other than just the fallen
tree was preventing the cat from pulling herself free. But
what was it?
The last thing Willa wanted to do was go back into the
black swirling water and encounter whatever was lurking down
there. But she had no choice. She sucked in a deep breath of
air and plunged in headfirst.
She knew immediately that she shouldn’t have done it.
She could barely see through the cold murkiness of the water,
and the undertow rushing between the logs was far more
powerful than she expected. She tried to swim against it. She
pumped her arms and kicked her legs and swam with all her
strength. But it was useless. The current grabbed hold of her
and slammed her against a submerged log, pinning her below
the surface of the water. She couldn’t swim free. She
couldn’t breathe.
She was going to drown in seconds.
Something brushed against her leg again. She reflexively
squirmed away from it, but she couldn’t even take a breath.
She had to get to the surface!
Then she felt dozens of tiny hands against her calves and
her thighs. Other hands were pressing against her side,
trying to turn her body in line with the rush of the current.
A lean body swam between her legs and another pushed against
her ribs. She was being engulfed by furred attackers!
Her mouth came up out of the water and she sucked in a
powerful gasping breath. She pulled the air all the way in,
letting it flow down into her grateful lungs, and grabbed one
of the larger branches of the nearest tree so the current
couldn’t pull her away.
A small, furred, dark face popped up out of the water in
front of her. It had long whiskers, a little black nose, and
dark, sparkling eyes. The river otter chattered at her, and
then went back under the water.
Suddenly the water was filled with otters swimming all
around her, rubbing against her, holding her, pushing her
with their hands, shoving her with their shoulders against
her body. She could see that some of the otters had been
burned by the flames when the explosion destroyed their holt,
but they seemed determined to help her.
 The same otter as before popped up in front of her again,
scolding her with his chattering, as if he was irritated that
she wasn’t following his instructions. And then finally, she
understood.
“But if I let go of this branch, I’m going to drown!”
she told the otter in the old language.
But it was no use talking to him. Let go, you foolish
girl! Let go! he seemed to be chattering.
There was a loud crack of timber and a jolting movement
as the logjam began to shift. More water started pouring
through the logs. It was the river’s will to keep moving,
and the river was going to win. It was going to push and
swirl and wash all these logs away, and her and the panther
and the otters with them.
Willa looked over at the trapped panther. She was barely
hanging on. Her mouth was open, with its long, curved fangs,
half in and half out of the water, and she was sinking deeper
as the waters rose.
Taking one final breath, and fully expecting the current
to sweep her away to her death, Willa finally did what the
otters wanted her to do: she let go of the branch.
The otters immediately pushed in on her, twisting her
body, showing her how to swim, how to dive, how to slip in
between. You’re small like us, they seemed to be saying. You
can’t fight the current. You can’t swim against it. You
swim WITH it! You slip through it. You spin, you dive, you
fly! Use the water’s power to propel you! You twist, you
turn, gliding through as fast and slippery as a fish.
With the otters pushing against her like she was one of
their little pups, she was suddenly doing it; she was
slipping through the water.
The otter who had chattered at her on the surface led her
deep into the dark, turbulent water beneath the tangle of
submerged logs that were holding the panther’s hind legs.
The water was swirling red, filled with the panther’s blood.
And then she finally saw it: a steel trap had clamped onto
the panther’s back foot, and it could not escape.
W illa came up to the surface and took a gasp of air. “I’m
sorry,” she said, shaking her head to the panther. “I
don’t think I can get that trap off your foot.”
Glancing up toward the edge of the ravine, Willa saw the
jaetters making their way down through the loose gravel. The
jaetters were hollering as they came, brandishing their newly
sharpened spears.
 The panther was being dragged under the water by the pull
of the trap’s chain. As her head sunk deeper and deeper, the
panther opened her yellow eyes and looked at Willa. There was
something about those eyes, something knowing , something
pleading with her. But what could she do? It was a steel trap
held down by a massive tree!
In a moment of careless sympathy, Willa reached out with
both her hands and touched the panther’s face and head, as
if to comfort her, to hold her there, to save her from being
dragged under, but she knew it was no use.
“I’m sorry!” Willa cried out as the panther’s head
went all the way under the water.
There was nothing she could do.
The panther was gone.
She was dead.
Willa was sure of it.
Then she saw her eyes. They were a foot under the water.
But those yellow eyes were still open and they were staring
up at her. She wasn’t giving up. She was holding her breath.
You can do this! the eyes were telling her.
With the otters chattering frantically and swimming all
around her, Willa pulled in a lungful of air, then dove deep
into the water. She swam down through the swirling darkness
toward the steel trap. The otters swam with her, guiding her
through the tangle of trunks and branches. She grabbed the
jaws of the trap with her fingers and tried to pull it open,
but the trap’s spring was far too strong. She pushed and
pried and pulled, but it was no use.
Remembering how Lorcan and the other guard had tried to
free the padaran by pushing down on the levers on each side
of the jaws, Willa grabbed the levers with her hands and
pushed as hard as she could. But the levers didn’t move at
all.
Hoping to use the muscles of her legs, Willa swam up
through the tight, twisting tangle of submerged branches,
positioned herself with her feet on the trap’s levers,
braced her back against a branch, and shoved her feet
downward as hard as she could. But nothing happened. The
levers didn’t budge. The jaws didn’t open. She just wasn’t
strong enough, or she didn’t understand how the trap worked.
She just couldn’t do it.
The panther yanked and pulled her trapped leg like she
understood exactly what Willa was trying to do for her, and
was trying to help her do it. But it made no difference. The
panther couldn’t get free. Everything was trapped in the
logjam. The trees, the branches, the cat…
Then Willa realized that these weren’t just old, dead
sticks submerged beneath the water. The humans had toppled
these trees into the river with their saws and their
explosives. The trees were still alive. They were still
struggling to survive. Their spirits were still strong!
Willa swam down to the trap once more, but this time she
didn’t touch the cold, metal pieces over which she had no
sway. She put her hands on the surrounding branches and
closed her eyes.
She had practiced the kind of woodcraft she needed now
when she was with her mamaw. But she had been in a healthy
forest at the time, with her mamaw at her side, encouraging
her, showing her the way. But now Willa was submerged in a
logjammed river. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak.
She could barely hold herself in one place under the water.
But she had to try.
She gripped the branches, reached deep down into her
sylvan heart, and awoke the spirits of the drowning trees.
As she infused them with her will, the branches of the
trees began to twist and turn. They moved like fast-growing
vines, winding through the murky water, furling themselves
into and around the metal jaws of the trap.
This time, the limbs of the trees weren’t moving of
their own accord or because she’d asked them to. She was
commanding them, controlling them, guiding them to grip the
metal and pull.
 As she tightened her muscles and gritted her teeth, the
branches slowly pulled the jaws of the trap apart.
The panther pulled and pulled again. And then, finally,
yanked her paw free.
As the cat swam frantically toward the surface, her sharp
claws raked across Willa’s thigh, tearing a painfully deep
scratch into her leg.
With her leg bleeding, Willa swam upward toward the
light. She broke the surface of the water and took a much-
needed breath. But Kearnin loomed above her and drove the
point of his spear right at her face. The panther burst out
of the water with a snarling roar, and slammed into the
jaetter with her claws, knocking him away. Gredic, Ciderg,
and a dozen other jaetters charged forward, attacking with
their spears.
The panther looked at Willa to make sure she was safe.
Those bright yellow eyes were staring right at her.
“Yes, go now, go!” Willa screamed at the panther.
“Run!”
Wounded and exhausted, but still filled with startling
power, the freed panther bound straight up the steep slope of
the ravine, then leapt into the forest and disappeared.
Willa felt a flush of happiness as the panther dashed to
safety.
As all the jaetters surrounded her at the edge of the
river, Gredic said, “We’ve got you now, Willa. There’s no
place you can go.”
But as the jaetters came forward, she let herself fall
back into the river, right into the most powerful current. It
swept her away instantly, hurtling her downstream with
tremendous speed.
The spear-boys might be able to catch a Faeran girl, but
they’d never catch an otter.
A long way downstream from the logjam and the jaetters, Willa
crawled out of the river and collapsed to the ground,
thankful to be out of the cold, rushing water.
The rocks are strong, she thought, but the river wins. It
turns. It tumbles. It chooses the path.
As she lay on the bank, the sun gave her its warmth, the
earth gave her its stillness, and the living trees held sway
over the world once more.
 She felt a sense of quiet and safety beginning to return,
at least here, at least for a little while.
But her mind burned with memories of the devastation
she’d escaped behind her, the earth torn apart and her
mighty old friends crashing to the ground. She still felt the
shake of the falling bodies in her bones, still heard the
cracking limbs in her ears. The river had washed the sap from
her hands, but the stench of the killing field lingered in
her nose.
It sickened her how the jagged-tooth steel blades had cut
so savagely through the living trunks of the trees. She
remembered how the loggers with the axes had cleaved the
helpless branches. And the shouting men with the snapping
whips had yanked at the leather-bound heads of the wild-eyed
horses to drag the carcasses of the trees across the ground.
The memories were aflame in her heart. But the worst
memory of all were the birds, the hundreds of birds, their
feathers torn and tattered, their wings twisted and broken,
their bodies lying dead on the ground. A nest. A fox. A
mantis. A fawn. A tree wasn’t a tree. It was a world. And
the men with the iron beasts were killing them by the
thousands.
She didn’t understand the newcomers. What was in their
souls to make them want to destroy the beauty and sustenance
of the world in such a way? What kind of evil drove them?
Whatever it was, it was clear that they had come for one
purpose: to cut down the forest and take the bodies of the
trees back to where they came from. And they didn’t care who
or what they destroyed to do it.
But as dark and frightening as the memories were, the
forest around her now provided a warm, soft, green refuge,
peaceful and serene. A gentle breeze flowed through the
hemlocks, the birches, and the dogwood trees that grew along
the river. And she could hear the buzzy murmur and tiny,
clawlike feet of a nuthatch climbing up the bark of a nearby
trunk. A small flock of chickadees whistled and cavorted in
the branches above. It was as if the forest knew what she
most needed at this moment, that the quiet whispers of the
olden ways would soothe her woodland soul.
When her mind turned to the panther, Willa smiled. Her
heart swelled with pride. She’d actually saved the life of a
black panther! Her mamaw would have been so pleased, and she
would have wanted to hear all about it. In some ways,
everything that had happened since she’d left Dead Hollow
didn’t feel real yet, like she hadn’t truly experienced it,
not until she’d told her mamaw all about it.
Still thinking about her grandmother, and her sister,
Alliw, long ago, Willa gathered goldenseal and witch hazel
leaves from nearby, then bound the wounds on her leg where
the panther had scratched her. She knew the cat hadn’t meant
to hurt her. She’d just been trying to get to the surface.
Even panthers had to breathe.
As Willa worked on her leg, she remembered the cat’s
striking yellow eyes staring at her from beneath the surface
of the water. You can do this! the panther had been telling
her. And she did do it.
She just wished there had been more time. She could have
helped the cat with her wounds, or sat with her for a little
while, speaking with her in the old language the way she did
with the wolves and the bears. But everything had happened so
fast, and then she was gone. She kept wondering where the cat
came from. Did she have a family of some kind, or was the
panther on her own like she was?
She couldn’t explain it, but she longed to see the cat
again. She realized she was being foolish. That panther was a
vicious predator. Given half a chance, she would have
probably torn her to pieces and eaten her for lunch.
But sitting there by the side of the river alone, Willa
missed her all the same. There was a kind of camaraderie in
the danger they had shared, the way they had worked together,
the way they had helped each other. Willa knew that the
jaetter Kearnin would have killed her with that spear if the
panther hadn’t struck him down. The cat had moved so fast,
faster than anything she’d ever seen. And it was for her
.
Not only had she saved a black panther, the black panther had
saved her in return.
She spent the next several hours combing the forest,
looking for the panther’s tracks and trying to pick up her
scent. Willa foraged along the way, eating the wild
strawberries she found hiding beneath their white blossoms
and the green sochan leaves growing along the little streams
in the forest.
Eventually, she returned to the bank of the river where
she had begun. It was no use. The Ghost of the Forest had
truly disappeared. Willa plopped down on the ground in
disappointment.
She knew that the truth was, she wasn’t just looking for
the panther. The panther wasn’t what she longed for. She
longed for her mamaw, and for her sister, for anyone
. She
wanted someone to talk to about what she’d seen, about what
she’d done, about all the things that had happened.
She hadn’t spoken with a living person in days. Her
mamaw had been the last.
Where was she going to find a new den, a new place to
hang her cocoon and sleep her nights? Her grandmother had
given her the knowledge and skills to survive in the forest,
but where was she going to find a place for her heart to
live? How was she going to live in the world so alone?
She looked around at the forest, and then out across the
water of the river, not sure where to go or what to do.
Seeing the destruction of the forest had left her feeling so
helpless, so small.
The Cherokee families she’d seen earlier that day were
long gone now. The wolves, the bears, they had their own
kind, their own lives to live. She was truly alone.
She stared into the river, letting the mesmerizing flow
of the water wash over her mind. She wanted the motion of it
to numb her, to sweep away the ache, to somehow blend her
woeful spirit into the world.
But even as she watched the flow of the river, she knew
where it would lead her. In all that had happened over the
last few days, in all the violence and conflict she had seen,
one act of kindness stuck in her mind. She kept thinking
about it, the unexpectedness of it. She couldn’t get free of
it. She didn’t want it to be the answer. She didn’t want to
take that path. It made no sense to her. But the whole time
she was sitting there staring into the water, a part of her
already knew what she was going to do. All the streams in her
heart were leading her back to that one place. That one
moment. And it wasn’t far. All she had to do was follow the
river.
W illa crept up to the edge of the forest, wove herself into
the leaves of the undergrowth, and gazed toward the wooden
lair of the day-folk man who had shot her.
The man was walking across the grass, his black-and-white
dog following closely at his side. He wore a brown vest and a
shirt with wrinkled sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a
wide-brimmed hat that shaded his eyes from the sun.
 She didn’t know all of the Eng-lish words the
homesteaders used, but she was pretty sure that they called
the lairs they lived in a “cabin” or a “house” depending
on how they had cut up the bodies they had used to make it.
They were crude words, and she didn’t like them in her mind.
And she knew that the “barn” was where they kept their
animals. Many of the homesteaders lived in small log cabins,
but this man had built a house, a barn, and a third building
she didn’t have a name for. And this was the building he was
walking toward.
He had covered the roof of the building with overlapping
slices of dead trees and he’d pieced together the walls from
stones he’d stolen from the river. But the oddest feature of
the building was that it had a large wooden wheel on the
side, with a thick central shaft, eight spokes, and what
looked like rectangular wooden buckets hanging on the curve
of the wheel. She couldn’t imagine what it was all for.
The man walked over to a narrow channel that he’d dug in
the ground to take water from the river, and then pulled on a
lever that opened some sort of divider. The stolen water came
gushing through a chute and splashed down onto the buckets.
There was a deep groaning sound, and then—to her amazement—
the wheel began to turn, the buckets filling at the top and
then emptying at the bottom, with the water pouring into a
small pond, and then continuing on through another channel
back toward the river.
She’d never seen anything like it. The man was stealing
the water of the river, and then giving it back.
The shaft in the center of the wheel turned and turned,
and something inside the building rumbled with the grinding,
gritty sound of stone rubbing on stone.
She couldn’t understand how he took the movement of the
water and changed it into the movement of the wheel, but that
was the spell he had cast.
But then a loud clanking noise erupted from the building
and the wheel shook violently, the wood twisting and creaking
as if the wheel was going to tear apart. The man lurched
forward and closed the divider as quickly as he could,
bringing the wheel to a shuddering halt.
He gazed at his contraption in stunned confusion, then
his face clouded with anger and he clenched his jaw, as if he
suspected an enemy had purposefully sabotaged his machine.
He grabbed a tool with a long metal handle, then climbed
up the giant wheel and crawled through the spokes into a
dense thicket of metal branches. He cranked and he twisted.
He hammered and he shoved, shouting out harsh words she
didn’t understand.
When he finally crawled out again, his knuckles were
bloody. He went over to the lever and pulled it for the
second time. The water came tumbling down as it had before
and the wheel started to turn once more.
This time, he didn’t just look satisfied that his
machine was working, he looked defiant, as if he had defeated
the most powerful of enemies.
Over the next hour, he carried large burlap bags into the
building on his shoulder. She had seen the farmers in Cades
Cove filling bags like these with wheat from their fields.
She stayed where she was in the forest, but she watched
him through the open windows and door of the building. The
man poured the bags into a metal mouth where the grains
trickled down between two flat stones and were ground into a
whitish-yellow powder.
While the water wheel did its work, the man walked over
to the stack of severed limbs and trunks at the side of his
house, picked up a killing ax, and started cleaving the logs
in half. The wood was from the previous season, so she
didn’t hear its cries, but it was still difficult to watch.
She hated how he used a wood-handled ax to cut more wood.
As he split one log after another, he grunted, slamming
the ax into the wood harder and harder with each stroke, the
wood making a sharp cracking sound as he split it. Sweat
beaded on his brow, and he ground his teeth as he hurled the
cloven slabs of wood aside.
It seemed as if he had fixed the problem with the wheel,
so why was he so angry? Frustration seemed to be boiling up
inside him. It was like he didn’t want to just split those
pieces of tree but crack open the earth they’d grown from.
His breathing got louder and louder. His whiskered face
contorted with pain. And he just kept splitting, one log
after another, until his hands bled onto the handle of the
ax.
It reminded her of when she climbed the mountain, the way
she hadn’t cared that the rocks were cutting into her hands.
She had wanted the rocks to cut into her hands.
Finally exhausted, he hurled the ax to the ground,
collapsed beside the pile of wood that he had made, and
dropped his head into his cupped hands.
He rubbed his face and eyes, as if he wanted to smear
some memory from his mind.
In that moment, she remembered sitting by the stream that
had carried her away from the lair, trying to rub the images
of her mamaw’s dead body away. She remembered the longing in
her heart and the sadness in her soul.
The man’s shoulders drooped as he went quiet. And she
watched as his anger melted into a slow and dying anguish.
He made no noise, but she could see his body shaking as
he sobbed.
His dog, seeming to sense his master needed his help, lay
down beside him. The man slowly stopped sobbing and rubbed
the scruff of the dog’s neck with his hand as he stared with
glazed eyes out into the forest.
She didn’t understand what was happening to him, why he
was acting this way. But she could see that the man did not
have his killing-stick with him, and his ax was out of reach
now, a few feet away.
Her heart pounded and perspiration rose on her arms. She
was finding it more and more difficult to breathe.
But she slowly stepped out of the forest.
And she showed herself to him.
T he man looked at her in surprise, but did not immediately
try to kill her. He did not run for his killing-stick when he
saw her standing there at the edge of the woods. He did not
reach for the ax or pull out the knife he carried at his
side. He did not rouse his dog.
He did not move in any way.
But she knew he saw her. She could see his striking,
bright blue eyes staring at her intently as if he could not
quite believe what he was seeing.
She stood a dozen steps away from him, but she felt the
movement of his chest as he breathed slow steady breaths.
“You’re alive…” he said, his voice soft and low, but
filled with a trace of amazement. “And you’ve come back to
me…”
She did not speak, but she studied him, and she let him
study her. And for the moment—for the both of them—that was
enough.
Her heart beat in her chest as he looked at her. The
quills on the back of her neck tingled.
This is my enemy, she thought.And he’s seeing me.
The man stood perfectly still, as if he knew that the
slightest movement would scare her off.
When a breeze swept through the boughs of the trees, she
stepped back, blended into the forest, and disappeared.
T he next day, she watched him from the forest. He moved in
and out of the house, sometimes working in his barn, feeding
his goats and his chickens, or using tools she did not
understand. Other times he worked in the building that used
the water of the river to turn the giant wheel. He worked
quietly and on his own. But sometimes he paused in his work
and looked out into the forest, scanning the trees with a
careful eye.
 As the sun set and slowly withdrew its light from the
trees of the surrounding forest, the man went back into the
house. She watched as the window near the eating room lit up
with the soft glow of a candle. The stars above the trees
provided all the light she needed to see, but she liked
watching the glowing radiance of the candle as the man moved
from one room to another, the light moving with him, leaving
darkness behind, until finally he went up the stairs, into
the room where she had once seen him lying asleep in his bed,
and the candle went out.
It was a warm summer evening, with yellow-green fireflies
lighting on and off in the open area in front of the man’s
house while he slept. She walked over to a stand of
beautiful, old sourwood trees growing near the side of house,
with their craggy gray bark and their long, wavy limbs.
“Hello, my friends,” she said to them in the old
language, touching their trunks with her open hand as she
walked among them. “It’s good to meet you all.”
Deciding not to make a cocoon that night, she picked the
tallest of the trees and began to climb its trunk. “I hope
you don’t mind a friend for the night,” she said as she
reached its upper branches. Sourwoods weren’t large trees,
and they had bitter-tasting leaves, but she loved their
nectar when their flowers blossomed and she appreciated their
peaceful spirits. She always missed them when they slept in
the winter and rejoiced when they came awake each spring.
She found a good spot in the branches near a tight ball
of leaves with a bundle of baby squirrels snoring inside. As
the tendrils of the tree gently encircled her body to make
sure she didn’t fall, she curled up and went to sleep. It
was the first night in a long time that she didn’t dream of
stealing.
T he next morning when she woke, the dog was sitting at the
base of the tree, his ears perked and his eyes looking up
into the branches.
Had the dog somehow detected her? Or had the nest of
squirrels caught his attention?
He wasn’t barking or growling, and he didn’t seem
anxious to attack. But he looked keenly interested, like he
was certain there was something up in the tree, maybe the
two-legged forest creature he’d seen the day before.
“Come on, Scout,” the man called as he walked out of
the house, down the steps, and toward the barn. But upon
noticing the dog’s position by the tree, he stopped.
The man turned.
“Scout?”
But the dog didn’t move. His nose pointed straight up
into the tree.
This was a truly bad place to spend the night, Willa
decided.Now I’ve been treed by the pesky dog!
As the man walked toward the base of the tree, Willa’s
heart thumped. Goose bumps rose on her arms.
The man stood below her and peered up into the limbs of
the tree. His eyes moved from one spot to the next, looking
for her, but her legs and arms had taken on the appearance of
the branches, and her face was nothing but leaves.
“What do you see, boy?” he asked as he crouched down
beside his dog. “Is she up there?”
She’d shown herself to them two days before, but she
wouldn’t allow them to see her now, not like this, trapped
up in a tree peering down at them like an opossum.
When the man and his dog finally gave up and left the
area of the tree, Willa climbed down.
She watched the man go about his daily work. When he
walked through his orchard, she became as dark and crooked as
an apple tree’s trunk. When he tended to his vegetable
garden, she became as green and yellow as stalks of corn. And
at the end of the day, while the dog napped in the shade and
the man went down to the river to wash his hands and face,
she crouched on a rock nearby, as blue as water and gray as
stone.
The man finished washing up, then climbed back up onto
the bank and headed toward the path.
Willa jumped from the rock she’d been perched on, and
followed him into the forest.
 It was there, on the path that led to the house, that she
chose to reveal herself once more.
She pulled in a long, uncertain breath, relaxed the blend
of her skin, and stepped onto the path in front of him.
She appeared before him in her natural green colors, her
face spotted and streaked, her arms marked with marbled
patterns, her dark hair falling around her shoulders, and her
eyes emerald green.
When he looked up and saw her there, he stopped,
surprised, his eyes wide for a moment.
But he stood very still.
“I was hoping you’d come around again,” he said.
Suddenly, Willa became aware of her own breathing, the
position of her feet, and the perspiration on her neck. She
studied the man, looking for any signs of threat or attack,
taking in all the details: his watching eyes, the light brown
whiskers on his face, his hands freshly clean but scratched
and worn from his work, his wrinkled tan trousers wet to the
knees from standing in the river—all so different from any
sort of living thing she’d ever talked to before.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “It was so
dark and you were moving so fast. I couldn’t see anything. I
shouldn’t have pulled that trigger.”
He paused, waiting for her to reply. She wanted to speak
to him. She wanted to take a few steps closer to him. But she
didn’t know what to say to him or what to do. On the
outside, she imagined she appeared to be standing very still,
but on the inside, she felt like a trembling fawn, ready to
dash away at any moment.
“But you don’t seem to be too badly hurt anymore…” he
said, almost to himself, as if he was mystified that her
wounds had healed so quickly. “Listen,” he added gently.
“I know you and I didn’t get off to a good start. But I
want you to know that I will not harm you. You are welcome
here.”
 She had never heard the Faeran of Dead Hollow use the
Eng-lish word welcome
, but she had always loved the word
eluin , which she remembered her mother and father saying to
her many years before. “Esper dun eluin una,” they had told
her. The trees will always welcome you.
It was one of the few
memories she had of her parents.
And then the man said something else that surprised her.
“My name is Nathaniel.”
Her ears took the unusual sound into her mind.
But still she did not reply.
“Do you understand the words I’m speaking?” he asked
her softly.
Willa looked at him and took in a long, slow breath.
“I do,” she said.
They were the first words she had spoken to him.
As soon as the man Nathaniel heard her voice, his face
lit up with a sudden and genuine smile. She hadn’t seen a
smile in so long that it brought an unexpected wash of
happiness through her, and she couldn’t help but smile in
return.
“I’m glad,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if
you were some kind of spirit or something, or maybe my wits
were finally leaving me for good.”
“I’m as real as the trees around you,” she said.
“I’m just not used to talking to…” She let words dwindle
and didn’t finish her sentence.
“I understand,” he said. “Sometimes no words is just
the right amount.”
She wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but she liked the
kindness in his voice when he said it.
“Are you hungry?” he said as he began to walk toward
the house and gestured for her to follow him. “Let’s get
something to eat.”
But the instant he moved, she startled, and she was gone.
S he had reacted quickly and disappeared, a reflex more than a
decision. But once she had a moment to think about it, she
realized the man hadn’t been trying to hurt her. He had just
started to walk up toward the house.
But after it happened, she felt too uncertain to rejoin
him, and she withdrew back into the forest on her own.
The next morning, when the man Nathaniel and the dog,
Scout, came out of the house, the man walked over to the base
of the tree in which she was sleeping and set something on
the ground.
“In case you change your mind,” he said, and continued
on into the forest.
When the dog lingered behind to sniff at the plate, the
man said, “No, you’ve already had your breakfast. Now, come
on.”
Carrying his killing-stick in his right hand, the man
followed the path that ran along the bank of the river, his
dog trotting behind him. Soon they were gone.
As Willa climbed down the trunk of the tree and smelled
the plate of food, she realized how hungry she truly was. It
seemed like she was always hungry. Did the man know this
about her? Was that why he had asked her this odd question
about whether she was hungry? The Faeran of the Dead Hollow
lair would never ask her this question. They did not care.
As she crouched on the ground and ate the food, she
wondered where the man had gone with his dog and his killing-
stick. He had seemed very determined to find whatever he was
looking for.
But that evening, he returned exhausted and empty-handed,
the dog walking along dejectedly just behind him.
As they came toward the house, she decided to stand in
the open where they could see her. But she stayed near the
edge of the trees just in case.
Her temples immediately started pounding, and she had to
work hard to keep her breathing strong and steady, but
despite the anxiousness welling up inside her chest, she kept
her feet planted firmly in the grass.
The moment the dog saw her, he jolted to attention.
“Scout, stay!” the man said, stopping the dog in its
tracks. “Down!” The dog went down on his haunches
immediately, his whole body shaking with excitement. The dog
obviously wanted to run at her, bite her, shake her, tear her
to pieces, but the human’s command held him in place.
“She’s a friend, Scout,” the man said firmly. “You’re
gonna let her be. You got it? Let her be. She’s a friend.
You just stay .”
The dog’s eyes blazed with intense curiosity as he
watched her, but he seemed to understand the man’s
instructions.
When she felt at least somewhat certain the dog wasn’t
going to attack her, Willa moved her eyes to the man,
Nathaniel.
He was already looking at her, and he did not look
displeased to see her.
“How was your breakfast this morning?” he asked.
“Thank you,” she said, because she thought that was
what day-folk said to one another.
“Yesterday, I introduced myself, my name is Nathaniel,
and this here is Scout, but we didn’t get your name…”
When she thought about telling him her name, her mind
flooded with questions. What did a Faeran name mean to him,
what did it sound like? In what way could he use it? Could he
harm her with it?
There were many thoughts going through her mind all at
once, and many of them frightened her. But unlike the day
before, when her reflexes had acted before she could even
think, now her thoughts came more slowly, more in her
control.
“What do you wish me to call you?” he asked her.
“My name is Willa,” she said finally.
Nathaniel nodded. “That’s a fine and lovely name,” he
said. “It’s good to meet you, Willa. Did your mother give
you that name?”
“I do not know.”
“Is your mother nearby?” the man asked, looking out
into the forest. “Or your father?”
“My mother and father are dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, his voice filled
with something she had never heard outside her own den, a
tone, an emotion she didn’t have a word for. “When did your
parents pass away?” he asked.
“Six years ago,” she said.
“Then who takes care of you out here?” he asked.
“Out where?”
“In the forest.”
“The forest.”
“I don’t understand. Who feeds you and gives you
shelter? Where do you live?”
“The forest,” she said again.
“There must be someone—”
“I left my clan.”
“Your clan…” The man looked around at the forest as if
arrows were going to come flying out at him. “But you’re
not Cherokee, are you?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not Cherokee.”
“And you live around here in the forest? That’s where
you come from?”
Not sure she understood his question, she slowly pointed
toward the top of the Great Mountain, which was visible from
the open area in front of his house.
“You come from Clingmans Dome?” he asked in surprise,
but it was clear that he didn’t think he was understanding
her. “Don’t you live in a town? Maybe down in the valley,
in Cades Cove? Or maybe a new homestead I don’t know
about?”
“No. I live up there,” she said again, but then she
realized that wasn’t actually true anymore. She didn’t live
in Dead Hollow any longer. She lived in the forest. “I live
here,” she said, knowing that she was probably confusing him
as much as he was confusing her.
“But who were your parents? What is your last name?”
She didn’t understand. She had already told him her
name. She thought she knew the Eng-lish words of the day-
folk, but she realized now that she must not.
 “Well, in any case…” He turned very slowly this time
and carefully gestured for her to follow him. “Come on into
the house and get something to eat.”
It had startled her before, but this time she held back
her reflex to blend. When he walked, she walked with him, not
quite at his side, but a few feet away from him. And the dog
crept along with them, eyeing her with quick tilts of his
head, but not biting her or even growling. He seemed to
understand that the man Nathaniel did not want him to attack
her.
As they went up the steps and through the front door, she
paused, remembering the night she’d come here—the blasting
noise of the killing-stick, the chomping teeth of the dog,
the pain and blood of her wounds, her desperate escape out to
the barn—it all started coming back to her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You and I have made our
peace and buried the hatchet.”
“The hatchet?” she said, pretty sure that this was a
kind of small, sapling-killing ax of the hand.
“It’s just an old expression,” he said. “Come on
inside.”
Willa stepped into the house and gazed around at the
eating room and the main room beyond. Everything seemed so
different from what it was when she had been crawling on the
floor through the darkness.
“What do you have a hankering for?” he asked.
Willa knew immediately what she wanted, even before she
could recall its name. She tried to remember what the
Cherokee prisoner-boy had called them. The word felt wrong on
her lips, garbled, like it couldn’t actually be a real word,
but it made her mouth water just to think about it.
“Cook…” she said. “Cookies. I have a…” She tried to
remember the words he had used. “I have a hankering for
cookies.”
“Ah,” he said. “I thought maybe somebody besides me
and Scout had been into that jar.” The man Nathaniel started
to smile. He was trying to be kind to her—“welcoming,” as
he called it—but as soon as he said these words, he seemed
to be suddenly overcome: his expression contorted and he
turned away from her, rubbing his forehead with his hand.
“I’m afraid my supply of cookies has run dry,” he said
soberly, his voice shaking with emotion.
After a few moments, he regained his composure and turned
back around. “But I’ve got some good, fresh cornbread from
the latest batch from the mill, and I can cook up some
venison if you want a proper meal.”
“What is venison?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “You know…meat.”
When he saw the confusion in her face he said, “Deer
meat.”
“I sleep with deer, I don’t eat them,” she said.
“Ah…” he said hesitantly. “All right…No venison,
then. What do you eat?”
“Shoots, berries, nuts, rock tripe lichen…”
He tilted his head, as if he wasn’t sure if she was
being serious with him.
“I’ve tried that sort of thing,” he said, “but never
been too partial to it. I’m afraid sticks taste like sticks,
if you know what I mean. And I hate acorns in particular. My
papa used to tell me you can eat ’em, but I think you’d
have to be full-on starving to do it. Well, listen, let’s
try some of this cornbread over here and see how you like
it.”
“What animal did you kill to make the cornbread?” she
asked, narrowing her eyes at him.
“It’s made from corn flour from the mill,” he said.
“The wheel in the water.”
“That’s right.”
“So it’s called a mill.”
“Yes, that’s right. People bring me their corn and
their wheat and I grind it. I take one sack out of every
eight in the way of payment. I figure, why plant and harvest
crops, digging in the dirt for somebody else all day, when I
can sit and watch a wheel go ’round on my own sweet time.”
“You weren’t watching the wheel go ’round on the day I
first saw you,” she said, trying to say the word ’round
like he did.
“No, that’s true,” he said. “Somebody did me a bad
turn, shoved a hammer in the machinery, knocked everything
all catawampus, trying to break the teeth off my main gear.
Looking to put me out of business, no doubt. But I stopped it
in time and got the gears lined up proper again.”
Willa listened as carefully as she could, trying to
understand all the confusing words he used, but she couldn’t
understand how the mill could have teeth.
“I’m competing with half a dozen other mills down in
Cades Cove,” he continued on. “So I need to keep working.”
“Is that who damaged the mill?”
“No, no, those are good folk down there,” he said.
“We’re competitors, sure, but they’d never do anything
underhanded like that.” He looked out the window toward the
forest. “I know exactly who did it,” he added bitterly.
“And those are the ones you gotta be careful of.”
This man Nathaniel talked in a peculiar fashion, and he
talked a lot. It was as if for years he had been used to
talking all day long, but lately he had been alone, and all
the words pent up inside him came pouring out, like water
splashing down through the buckets of his wheel.
As he continued, she didn’t speak as much as he did, but
watched him and listened to him. He fascinated her. He
wasn’t anything like what the padaran had told her the day-
folk were. He wasn’t violent or hateful. He didn’t attack
her or beat her or try to capture her or kill her. She’d
seen other homesteaders only from a distance—small families
building their log cabins, tending to their little farms,
traveling on their carriages—but this man, this man who
called himself Nathaniel seemed so different from the
padaran, the jaetters, and the other Faeran of the clan. Were
all the day-folk as evil as the padaran described other than
this one man?
“Why do you cut the trees?” she blurted out suddenly,
looking for his evilness.
“Ah…” He hesitated, unable to find the words to
explain his actions.
“Why do you kill them?” she pressed him.
“I cut down trees to…make my house, to warm my home, to
make tools…There are many uses for wood. I could not live
here without it. Why are you asking this question? Are the
trees friends of yours?”
She knew he had meant this as a joke, but she answered
with the truth. “Yes, they are,” she said. “And when you
cut them they die.”
He studied her for several long seconds, not saying a
word.
“Yes,” he admitted finally, quite softly. “The trees
die. But I only cut what I need. We all have to survive.”
“Do you need that wall?” she asked pointing toward the
wooden wall. “Do you need the wooden wheel that turns in the
water more than those trees needed their lives? Do you need
the meat of the deer more than the deer needs her life, more
than the fawn needs her mother?”
“I never looked at it that way,” he admitted. And then
he repeated, “I just take what I need.”
“Like the wolf,” she said.
“I don’t know about that,” he said, bristling. He
didn’t like to be compared to a wolf.
She could see he had no love for wolves. He was a kind
man, but a fool, too.
She watched as he pulled out a sharpened blade of steel
with an antler-grip, cut a slice of cornbread, and handed it
to her.
“Have some of this and see how you like that mill,” he
said, smiling a little. “You want butter on that?”
 “No,” she said. She didn’t know what butter was or
what he killed to make it.
As soon as she put the bread between her lips, it began
to melt in her mouth. It was unlike anything she had ever
tasted before.
“You like that,” he said, nodding and smiling. “You
like it a lot. You see, I’m not all bad.”
That first day, when she was watching him from the
forest, he had seemed so sad, and then his melancholy shifted
like the wind into a deep anger. And when he returned from
his journey down the river earlier that afternoon, he had
seemed so exhausted, not just in body but in spirit. But now
he seemed to have forgotten a little bit of what had stormed
through him a short time before, and she could feel the same
thing happening to her. Their words and their smiles were
affecting her, changing her in little ways, like the river
shaping the stone.
I n the days that followed, it was one strange incident after
another.
She ate with the man Nathaniel while sitting at something
he called his dinner table.
She sat with him and the dog by the warm glow of the fire
in the evenings.
She watched him work in his mill in the afternoons, with
the turn, turn, turning of the millstone grinding the wheat
into flour while they talked.
Sometimes they walked together in the forest, teaching
each other the way they saw the world.
She learned many new Eng-lish words, like that he called
his killing-stick a “rifle” or a “gun.” And she taught
him the Faeran names of many of the plants and animals in the
forest. When he showed her how to operate the mill, she
taught him the songs of the birds flitting in the trees above
their heads.
“There’s something that has always confused me about
the Eng-lish language,” she admitted one afternoon, as they
walked in the forest.
“What is it?” he asked.
She stopped and pointed to the needles of a pine tree.
“What color do you call that?”
“Green,” he said.
“In the Faeran language that color is called erunda,”
she said. “So, if the pine needles are what you call green,
then what color is that?” She pointed to fresh grass growing
in a small patch of sunlight.
“That’s green, too,” he said.
“But that’s finlalin,” she said in confusion. “They
are totally different colors.”
“Light green?” He shrugged. “It’s still green.”
“What about that color there?” she asked, pointing to
the shiny, waxy leaves of a rhododendron bush.
“Green,” he said.
“No!” she said in exasperation. “That’s a different
color. You can see the difference with your eyes, right?”
“Looks like green to me,” he said. “Maybe a slightly
different shade, but it’s still green. How many words do you
have in your language for the green colors you see in the
forest?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. They’re all
different colors to me. But at least forty or fifty.”
 “I’ll stick with regular old green, thank you,” he
said with a smile, bumping her gently with his arm.
As they continued through the forest, she couldn’t help
from taking a quiet, contented sigh. There was something
about spending time with this unusual human that felt
surprisingly like her soul was swimming in the warm water of
the sacred lake of the bears.
But every morning, the man Nathaniel grabbed his killing-
stick and trudged into the forest in the direction of the
river with his dog Scout at his side. He did not tell her
where he was going or what he was doing, and it was clear
that he didn’t want to talk about it.
Curious to know what he was doing, she slipped through
the undergrowth and watched him from a distance.
He followed the bank of the river downstream, close along
the jagged, moss-covered rocks, many of them towering over
his head, others low and tumbled, with the water flowing
between them.
The dog ran up and down along the bank, his nose to the
ground looking for scent, working with the man Nathaniel,
seeming to understand what he was looking for and as anxious
to find it as he was.
The man and the dog came to a shallow section of the
river where it was clear the man wanted to cross, but the
water was running strong even here. To her amazement, the man
slung his rifle by its leather strap over his back, picked
his dog up in his arms, and began to wade across.
He plowed slowly through the current with forceful,
deliberate steps as the water crashed against his thighs.
“Be careful,” Willa whispered as she watched from the
trees, the palms of her hands sweating.
She could imagine the powerful current pulling the man
Nathaniel off his feet, and sweeping him and the frantically
swimming dog down into the rocky rapids below.
When they finally reached the other side, the dog leapt
from his arms and shook himself dry, and then the two of them
continued on their way, receding into the distance farther
downstream on the opposite bank of the river.
She thought the man and his dog must be going out to hunt
for their food, and that he wasn’t talking about it because
he knew it would bother her. But when they returned later
that afternoon, the man wasn’t just empty-handed but solemn
and exhausted, like he’d gone to the ends of the earth. His
boots and trousers were soaked, his hands roughened by the
abrasion of stone, and his clothes were torn.
Willa’s brows furrowed in confusion. Where was he going
every day? What was he doing out there?
She watched from her spot in the top of the sourwood tree
as they came up from the river. The dog ran into the house,
his tail wagging, excited to be home—maybe looking for her,
she thought.
But the man Nathaniel didn’t go in.
He walked in silence to the meadow near the house, where
the rays of the setting sun were shining down. He stood there
alone, unmoving and unchanging for a long time, except for
the glisten of light trickling down his cheeks.
As she watched him, she felt as if the world was being
held still, held in that moment, as if she couldn’t breathe,
couldn’t move, her heart slowing to a low, steady thumping
beat, as if in that moment she could reach out across the
distance between them, and without any knowledge or
understanding or words, know what the man Nathaniel was
feeling.
Later that evening, with the feeling of that moment still
in her heart, she went down to the river and sat by herself,
listening to the water flowing between the stones, and
remembering the sound of her grandmother’s Faeran voice.
She remembered the look in her grandmother’s eyes and
the warmth of her touch, the way her mamaw had wrapped her in
her arms, as if she were encasing her in a cocoon that would
protect her forever.
 And Willa remembered playing games of hide-and-seek with
her sister, Alliw, in the dappled shade of the wooded dells—
the two of them blending from one place to another as they
took turns hiding from one another. She remembered the smile
that lit up Alliw’s little spotted face whenever Willa found
her. They played through the sunlit days and the moonlit
nights, running and blending and searching and laughing, over
and over again.
Sitting there by the river on her own, she could see it
all in her mind. And she could hear the soft sound of
Alliw’s voice as they explored the forest together with
their mamaw and their parents. She remembered Alliw talking
to a nest of frightened sparrows that had fallen from a tree,
the way she cupped the little birds in her hands and
reassured them that she would put them back where they
belonged.
Willa remembered it all, but as the sound of the Faeran
words drifted from her memory, it was like the whispers of
the water flowing down the tumbling river.
And as the moon rose from the darkened peak of the Great
Mountain looming in the distance, the man Nathaniel came down
to the river, and sat beside her in the quiet, and seemed to
understand not just her sense of silence, but her sense of
loss.
He seemed to know, as if from his own experience, that
there were parts of her life that he could not understand,
words from her past that she longed to hear, but he could not
speak.
T he next day, while the man Nathaniel was away down the
river, Willa remained in the forest near the house.
Every day, wherever she was and whatever she was doing,
she had been practicing her woodland skills. Her mamaw had
taught her the long history of her sky-reaching friends and
the other plants, and all the ancient words and whispers she
needed to converse with them. But now that she had begun to
learn more and more on her own, she realized there was so
much more she wanted to understand and do.
She practiced lying on the ground in a patch of ferns and
vines, and then asking the plants to grow across her body
until she disappeared, not just by blending the color and
texture of her skin, but by physically covering the entirety
of her body with the growth of the plants. She was able to
achieve the growth she wanted. But it turned out to be
surprisingly difficult to actually get out of the ferns and
vines once they’d grown over her. The plants seemed to like
holding on to her, with their tiny, sticky stems and their
curling tendrils adhering to her skin.
As she was climbing out of the vines, she noticed a small
slug slithering over a nearby rock. That was one of the few
creatures of the forest she didn’t like, but this time it
repulsed her even more than usual. The slug’s mucus-coated
skin reminded her of the padaran when he caught his foot in
the jaws of the trap. She still couldn’t figure out exactly
what she had seen when she glanced back to look at him. But
the image had stuck in her memory. The padaran had always had
deep bronze skin that seemed to be filled with light, but for
that single moment when he was in terrible pain and distress,
his skin had turned as gray and slimy as a slug.
Back when she was a jaetter stealing for the clan, she
thought the padaran was a great leader, feared and respected
by all, the wise father to her struggling people. But now
that she had left the lair, she wondered why he had hated the
old ways so deeply, why he had been trying so desperately to
wipe out the last remnants of the woodwitches and their
forest powers. What harm had they been doing?
She hated the dark memories of her old life. She didn’t
want to think about the Dead Hollow lair or the padaran. But
questions kept sneaking into her mind like little worms:
Where did he come from? Who was he?
She had heard stories that the padaran wasn’t a normal
Faeran like the other members of the clan, that he had come
down from the top of the Great Mountain to lead the Faeran
people. And it had been easy to believe. But what confused
her now was that she had actually climbed the Great Mountain,
felt its presence in her heart and heard its voice in her
soul. She remembered vast clouds of mist, and a soaring hawk,
and trees, and mountains for as far as the eye could see. But
she didn’t see any sign that the padaran, or anyone like
him, had ever been there.
Near the end of the day, when she heard the man Nathaniel
coming her way, she relaxed her blend so that he could see
her. As he walked up to her, a vine was growing along her arm
and around her wrist like a day-folk bracelet, and another
was twining up into her hair.
The man watched the movement of the vines in silence,
astonished and transfixed by what he was seeing.
“How do you do it?” he asked softly.
Willa tried to think of a way to explain it in Eng-lish
words, but it was difficult. “With my mind, and sometimes my
voice, I ask the vines to move.”
“Have you always been able to do this?”
“My mamaw has been teaching me all my life, and I’ve
been practicing more and more.”
“What do you…What do you call what you do?”
“In the Faeran language, it used to be called esperia .
In Eng-lish, we call it woodcraft.”
“Woodcraft…” he repeated slowly, as if he was trying
to absorb both the sound of it and the meaning of what he was
seeing.
“Years ago, many of my people had the knowledge and the
power of woodcraft. It still runs very strong in the members
of a few families. My mother and father, and my sister, all
had the power. And my grandmother was the one who taught me.
But I think I might be the last of the whisperers now…”
“The whisperers,” the man Nathaniel said in gentle
surprise. “I like the sound of that. And you and your people
call yourselves Faeran…Is that right?”
 Willa smiled and nodded. “And you and your people call
yourself human , is that right?”
The man Nathaniel smiled. “Yes, at least once I’ve had
my breakfast in the morning.”
She liked the way he smiled when he said these words, and
she liked the way it made her feel.
“Listen, I came over to ask you. I need to go check on
something, and I thought you might want to come along with
me. I think I could use your help.”
Willa rose to her feet, pleased to be included.
A while later, as she walked along with the man Nathaniel
and the dog Scout through the forest, she asked, “Where are
we going?”
“We left the edge of my property behind us,” he said,
making his way through the undergrowth of the trees, “but I
saw something back here in the woods that’s been festering
in my mind.”
“What do you mean, your property?” she asked.
“My land,” he said. “The property I own.”
She still didn’t understand.
As they walked along, Scout stayed close at her side. He
had become used to her, and her to him. She liked the way he
was always looking ahead, always scanning with his eyes and
nose and ears. She thought there must be a little bit of wolf
in him.
When she reached down to pet his head, he looked up at
her, and she was surprised to see the worry in his eyes. He
was smelling something ahead of them that he didn’t like one
bit.
She turned to Nathaniel and saw he was anxious as well.
They soon came to a footpath, and Nathaniel stopped.
“Can you sense anything?” he asked her. “Do you see
anything unusual?”
Understanding that he wanted her to put her woodland
skills to work, she crouched to the ground and looked at the
earth, the lichen, and leaves. She noticed the way some of
the ferns were bent and a few of the leaves were pressed
down.
“Humans have been walking here,” she said. “All of
them wearing heavy boots, one of them dragging some kind of
tool or object behind him.”
“How many men?” he asked.
“At least four,” she said, looking around at the
footprints.
Fear clouded Nathaniel’s face. “Can you tell how long
ago?”
Checking the amount of wear and dryness on the edge of
the footprints, and thinking about the last time it had
rained, she said, “Yesterday.”
“That’s not good,” he said, shaking his head. “Let’s
follow the tracks a little ways and see what we can learn.”
As they walked on, they both noticed long red strips of
cloth that had been tied onto some of the larger oak trees.
“What are they?” she asked.
“They’re marking the most important trees to cut,” he
said, his voice filled with fear and anger all at once.
“I don’t understand,” she said. The thought of cutting
down these beautiful trees made her eyes water, and she could
feel the heat rising up into her face.
“These men are scouts for the logging company, surveying
the forest to determine which groves to cut first, and
finding the best route for their railroad to come up into the
mountains. They’ve got a new kind of engine that puts power
to all its wheels so it can handle hauling full loads of logs
down the mountain slopes, but even the new engines have
limits, so they have to map out their path.”
“So, they’re coming up here now,” she said, her voice
cracking in dismay.
“Right now, what they most want is my land,” he said.
“I own a section along the river, the only one flat enough
for them to get their railroad line and their equipment up
onto the rest of the mountain where they want to cut. So
whatever you do, Willa, you need to avoid this area of the
forest from now on. It’s going to be too dangerous. Don’t
ever let those loggers see you.”
As he said these words, she could hear the trembling fear
in his voice. It felt like she could almost see the future he
was seeing, and it frightened her to her bone.
At that moment, Scout brushed past her leg and took to
sniffing something on the ground. Then he began to follow the
scent off the path.
“Scout’s onto something,” Nathaniel said, moving
toward him.
They followed the dog into the forest until Willa saw
something on the ground up ahead.
“Wait,” she whispered to the man Nathaniel, touching
his side to bring him to a stop.
When she crouched down, he crouched with her.
“What do you see?” he whispered, peering in the
direction she was looking.
It was well disguised in the leaves, but she could see
it. It was definitely there.
“Scout, come,” she said, her voice quiet but firm,
using the word she’d heard Nathaniel use, and she was
relieved that the dog quickly returned to her side.
“What do you see up there?” Nathaniel asked her again,
sensing her anxiousness.
She pointed toward the ground ten or twenty paces in
front of them. “Look carefully just ahead of us, by the
roots of that oak there, and along the forest floor over to
that chestnut tree. Do you see it? It’s a net, hidden
beneath the leaves.”
“It’s some sort of trap,” he whispered. “Someone must
be trying to capture an animal of some sort.”
“Do you think it belongs to the loggers?” she asked.
“I’ve never seen them use anything like that before.
They’re more interested in laying railroad tracks and
cutting trees than hunting and trapping, but maybe they’ve
been having trouble with a local bear. But for the life of
me, I don’t understand why they would want to catch a bear
in a net. Seems like it’s just asking for a face full of
claws.”
“Do any humans other than the loggers use this path?”
she asked.
“Yes, definitely,” he said. “Some of the other
homesteaders use it, and so do I.”
Willa stared at the net, not sure what to do.
But Nathaniel suddenly rose up and moved past her. He
picked up a large branch and heaved it into the center of the
trap. The net sprang up with a loud, violentswoosh , bringing
up an explosion of leaves with it. Then he pulled out the
long knife he carried on his belt and cut the net down.
“I don’t know who did this or why, but something like
this doesn’t belongs in these woods,” he said angrily as he
sliced the net to pieces and rendered it useless.
Then he touched her on the shoulder and gestured in the
direction of the house. “Come on, let’s get outta here
before somebody sees us.”
A ll the way back, she kept looking over her shoulder,
convinced that the loggers or night-spirits or some sinister
beasts she’d never seen before were going to chase them down
and attack them, but they made it safely home.
In the days that followed, they continued on with the
gentle patterns of their lives, working together in the water
mill, taking care of their animals, and each morning, the man
Nathaniel venturing out on his daily journeys down the river
and back again, trudging with a grim and relentless
determination.
In the afternoons, the man Nathaniel showed her how he
had planted corn, squash, and beans in his garden to grow
some of his food for the next season. And she showed him
where to find the tastiest roots and berries that grew wild
in the forest, and how to pick the sweetest brook lettuce
from the shallows of the nearby streams.
When a group of otters moved into the section of river
just downstream from the house, she took the man Nathaniel
down to meet them.
“The otters seem to be looking over at us every time
they come up for air,” he marveled, as they watched them
together. “But they don’t seem nervous about us being
here.”
“No, they’re not nervous,” she said. “They want to
know why I’m standing around with my feet on the ground
instead of swimming with them.”
One afternoon, after he’d returned for the day, Willa
watched the man Nathaniel from a distance. After completing
some of his usual chores, he climbed into an odd-looking
cloth suit with long dangling arms and legs that tied at the
wrists and ankles, a hood that went over his head, and a
metal mesh that covered his face. Then he tramped down a path
that led from the house.
Curious, she followed him through the stand of sourwood
trees and then through a small field filled with white and
purple clover, where bees and butterflies floated in the rays
of the setting sun.
He walked over to a cluster of five black gum tree logs
that had been cut into sections, stood on their ends, and
turned into beehives. Honeybees were flying to and from the
hives. It perplexed her that these bees would make their home
in these human-cut contrivances rather than a natural hole in
a living tree, but that appeared to be what they had done.
 The man opened up the hive at the top and began to
collect the wooden frames of honey as the bees buzzed and
circled all around him. She could hear by their tone that
they were a little bit agitated by his presence.
As Willa approached him, she shifted her color and made
enough noise to make herself known.
The man Nathaniel looked up at her, peering through his
mask.
“Stay back, Willa!” he shouted at her. “You don’t
have a suit on! Keep a safe distance!”
His face went white with fear as hundreds of bees swarmed
toward her and landed all over her body.
“Willa!” he shouted in dismay, thinking the bees were
attacking her.
“Eee na nin,” she said softly to him and to the bees as
she watched them crawling over the bare skin of her arms.
“They’re just saying hello. They’re telling me where to
find the best flowers.”
“What?” he said, frowning in confusion and doubt.
When he set down the rack he’d been working on and came
over to her, she showed him how the returning worker bees
danced in particular patterns to tell the other worker bees
where the flowers were blooming that morning.
“That’s incredible…” the man said. “I had no idea.”
The bees in the colony worked closely together,
communicating with each other, all laboring in harmony toward
the common goal of keeping the hive healthy and strong.
“Tia na lochen dar sendal,” she said.
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“ ‘We all have our ways to survive,’ ” she said.
“We sure do,” he said, still watching the bees. And
then, after a moment, he turned and looked at her.
“And what about you?” he asked. “What is your way to
survive?”
She looked back at him, not sure how to answer his
question. She knew he wasn’t asking about the kind of leaves
she ate or how she avoided predators. He had already seen
these parts of her life with his own eyes. Although the words
were the same, he was asking a whole different kind of
question. And for the first time, it felt like she was
beginning to see the hidden beauty of the language they were
speaking.
“What is your way to survive?” he asked again.
“I survive here,” she said.
T hat night, after they were done eating their dinner, Willa
played with Scout in the main room while the man Nathaniel
finished up the work in the kitchen.
She knew he was a cutter of trees and hunter of animals,
but sometimes, over the last few days, it had almost seemed
as if he understood the world the way she did. But other
times, she grew dismayed by the life he’d been living, and
her growing part in it.
 When she looked over, she saw him chewing on a wooden
sassafras twig as he swept the wooden-planked floor with a
wooden-handled broom and then cleared the four-legged wooden
kitchen table, sat down in a wooden chair, picked up a thin
stick of wood in his hand, and began to scratch marks on a
strange, impossibly flat sliver of whitish tree bark. He was
surrounded by wood.
When they first met he had told her that he could not
survive without it, and she was beginning to see what he
meant.
Was the man Nathaniel evil for using the trees and
animals to survive?
She didn’t know the answer to that question anymore. Did
that mean she knew more or less about the world?
“You said a few days ago that you own the land,” she
said.
“Yes,” he said gently as he stopped and looked at her.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t understand what that means. How? In what way?
The ground? The air? The trees? The animals? What does it
mean?”
“It means that this is my property, an area where I can
live my life the way I want to live, without asking anyone
else’s permission. I’m free. I can do what I want to do.”
She stared at him, trying to understand.
“My great-great-grandfather earned this land back in
1783 for serving in the Revolutionary War,” he said. “And
there’s been at least one Steadman living here ever since,
sometimes many more. This land is the only thing I have, and
that’s one of the reasons I’m not going to let the loggers
buy it from me, or take it away. As far as I’m concerned, it
isn’t for sale.”
“But how can you or the loggers or anyone claim a place
to be yours and only yours? I don’t understand.”
“I’ll ask you the same sort of question in reverse,”
he said. “How can you wander through the woods without ever
having a place to call your own, a place to call home?”
“I live in the world as it is, without disturbing it.”
He nodded and took a moment to think about her words.
“Disturbing it…” he repeated. “Is that what you call it?
Is that what I’m doing when I’m fixing my mill, planting my
sweet potatoes, or tending to my apple trees? I’m disturbing
it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What about the bees?”
“What about the bees?”
“Where do you think your friends the honeybees come
from?”
“They’ve always been here, like the trees and the
river.”
“No,” he said. “They haven’t. The people you call the
homesteaders, the day-folk, brought them from England to
America on their ships two hundred years ago. And then
somebody brought them up into these mountains. Yes, the bees
live here now. They’ve become part of the natural world. But
humans brought them here. And humans brought the clover in
the field as well. The clover, along with the sourwood trees,
makes the honey taste better. It’s true that we humans can
do terrible damage, but we can do good as well. I’ll give
you an example: there are plenty of sourwood trees in these
mountains, but there weren’t any right here around our house
and meadow, so my grandfather planted a hundred sourwood
saplings every year for as long as he was living.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, her brows furrowing.
The bees that she knew so well—whose language of movement
her grandmother had taught her—came from outside the world?
They came from the Eng-land of the homesteaders? How could
this be true?
And did he say that his grandfather had planted the
sourwood trees near the meadow? She had walked through those
trees. She hadspoken with those trees. She had slept in
those trees. Day-folk didn’t plant trees, they cut them
down!
“I know how you feel about the trees of the forest,” he
said. “I can’t live that way, but I understand it. And I
know how you feel about the animals. Are you angry with me
because I eat meat? Is that what’s bothering you?”
She thought about his question for a long time. And then
she slowly came to a realization, something she’d already
known but hadn’t truly understood before. “You are like a
wolf.”
“I am not a wolf!” he insisted, raising his voice as
his face turned flush with sudden red.
It startled her a little bit, but then it made her smile.
He didn’t like being compared to a wolf. He never had.
“I don’t hate wolves,” she said. “I love them. And I
don’t hate foxes or bobcats or otters. I don’t hate any of
the animals that hunt for their food any more than I hate the
vultures or the mushrooms for living off the decay of dead
things.”
Nathaniel stared at her, studying her for several seconds
with steady eyes. And then he smiled, and narrowed his eyes a
little bit at her, as if he was unsure whether he had just
been accepted or scorned.
A few nights later, after they had finished eating their
dinner, Willa worked with the man Nathaniel to clean the
table and wash up the plates. Then she went into the main
room and sat on the sofa in front of the fire with Scout
lying on her lap while she stroked the dog’s ears. She liked
the touch of his soft white fur on her fingertips, and she
knew by the way he nuzzled into her that he liked to be
petted there.
 The man Nathaniel sat at the kitchen table, and as he had
done a few nights before, he picked up his little stick of
wood and began to make marks on what looked like a very thin
piece of dead tree skin.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Making a list,” he replied. “I have to go down to
Gatlinburg tomorrow to take care of some business. It’s a
long way, so I’ll spend the night and be back the following
day.”
“Will you be taking the path where we saw the footprints
of the loggers?”
“Not that one, but one similar that goes down the
mountain toward town,” he said.
“You will need to be careful,” she said, and he nodded
in quiet agreement.
Willa didn’t know what Gatlinburg was, other than a
swarm of humans at the edge of the world, and she didn’t
completely understand what he had told her or how it related
to the symbols he was marking on the tree skin, but she
nodded her head and pretended she did. She didn’t know why
she said she understood when she didn’t, other than that she
wanted him to think that she did.
She wanted to belong, to know things, to be part of
things. She wanted all of this: the dog’s soft ears, the
crackling embers in the fireplace, the washing up after
dinner, and the man sitting at the kitchen table.
“Listen,” he said softly as he turned toward her. “All
these nights, you’ve been sleeping in the tree in the yard.
I was thinking you might want to come into the house, maybe
sleep inside here with us, if that’s something you would
want to do.”
Willa looked at him. She knew what he was asking.
“I’ll be back in a little while,” she said and walked
out of the house.
She went down to the river, gathered cane stalks and
willow twigs, and started weaving them together into a fine,
soft mesh until she had made a cocoon.
When she returned to the house and the man Nathaniel saw
what she had made, he got up from the kitchen table.
“Come on,” he said softly. “I have just the spot for
it.”
He took the cocoon upstairs, and she watched as he hung
it from the ceiling in his room near the open window where
she’d be close to the leaves and branches of the trees, and
be able to look out across the canopy of the forest toward
the rise and fall of the distant mountains.
Later that night, as they were lying there in the
darkness, he in his bed with his dog Scout on one side and
his killing-stick on the other, and she hanging from the
ceiling in her cocoon, the moonlight shone through the window
the same way it had the first night she had come here.
Just when she was about to fall into a deep and welcomed
sleep, he spoke in the darkness.
“Willa of the Wood,” he said softly, the sound of
mystery in his voice, as if there were things in the universe
that he just didn’t understand. “That’s who you are,” he
said. “You’re my Willa of the Wood.”
“Willa of the Wood,” she whispered to herself, smiling.
She liked the sound of that, and she liked the sound of
Nathaniel saying it.
Her life as a thieving jaetter seemed so far behind her
now, like a cold, murky season with few rays of light.
Through all their days and nights together, they had
talked of many things, but she knew there was far more that
they hadn’t spoken of.
She had told him of her life in the forest, of climbing
the mountain high and seeing the blue ghost fireflies, of the
sounds of the birds in the morning and the thrill of rescuing
a wounded panther. But she hadn’t told him of her life as a
jaetter in the Dead Hollow clan, or of the death of her
beloved mamaw, or of all the things she had done in the past.
The past was pain, seemingly for the both of them, and it was
a dark winter she had no want to return to.
And about him, too, there were thoughts she knew she
shouldn’t think. There were questions she knew she
shouldn’t ask. Why did he journey up and down the river
every day? Why were the other bedrooms of the house so empty?
What was the agony that lay behind his eyes?
W illa woke early the next morning when it was still dark and
went downstairs. Outside, the sounds of the night had died
down hours before, but the sound of the morning birds had not
yet begun. An eerie silence held sway.
Standing in the kitchen, she watched Nathaniel in silence
as he packed supplies into his leather knapsack for his long
journey through the forest down to Gatlinburg.
“I’ll see you when I get back,” he told her gently.
 She nodded quietly.
“I know you know how to take care of yourself in these
woods,” he said, “but if those loggers come around here
causing trouble when I’m gone, then you do that thing you
do, make yourself scarce.”
“I will,” she agreed. Making herself scarce, as he
called it, was just about the only thing she was good at.
She watched Nathaniel grab his rifle and head out the
door with Scout at his side, the dog content to go wherever
he was going.
She followed them out and then stood in the yard. Seeing
them fade into the thickness of the forest, she felt a
peculiar pang in her heart that she’d never felt before, and
she prayed they’d be safe.
She’d never been to Gatlinburg, but she’d seen it from
a distance. Why would he go to there?
As she went back into the house and walked through it
alone, she was struck by how different it seemed, so quiet
and lifeless now. It felt like a hollow wooden cave, long
abandoned by those who had once lived there.
She didn’t want to stay in the house without Nathaniel
and Scout there, so she went back outside. One by one, the
birds began to sing and chirp and whistle in the darkness,
each one making itself known to the others around it, until
the morning light began to fill the sky above the trees.
She felt an unusual restlessness. She wasn’t sure what
to do or where to go. She fed the goats and chickens, and
then made her way to the river. She gazed at the water
flowing among the large boulders, then walked along the
river’s path. She traveled downstream, staying close to the
river’s edge.
She had intended to walk just a little ways, but once she
started, she couldn’t stop. She just kept walking, pushing
herself hard. She went hour after hour, the cold water of the
river soaking her feet and legs when she crossed through its
shallow pools, and the rough surface of the jagged rocks
abrading the bare skin of her hands as she climbed over them.
She didn’t know what she was looking for. But Nathaniel
had done it every day, and it felt right to be doing it in
his stead, taking the same course he had taken.
As she journeyed down the river, she kept a sharp eye out
for whatever Nathaniel might have been looking for. She was
determined to figure it out.
She saw a family of raccoons, a mother and three little
ones, foraging for crawfish in the shallows with their tiny
hands. Another time, she spotted a fox staring at her from
the undergrowth. She often heard the rapping of the
woodpeckers, which always brought a smile to her face.
But then she heard a different kind of sound in the
distance.
She stopped and listened, tilting her head.
It was coming from across the river, a dull, repetitive,
thudding sound echoing ominously through the forest.
Her stomach wrenched into a twisting knot. It was the
sound of axes cutting into the living bodies of trees.
She sucked in a quick breath and pulled back from the
river into the underbrush of the forest.
The loggers were getting closer every day. Nathaniel had
warned her to stay clear of them, and she’d seen their
destruction with her own eyes. She had no want to see it
again.
She turned and fled through the forest for home, glancing
back over her shoulder as she ran. Sometimes she paused near
a tree, blended into the bark, and waited just long enough to
listen, then continued on.
As she made her way, she wondered if Nathaniel had been
journeying down the river every day to guard and protect his
land from the loggers, but she didn’t think so. He always
went downstream and always stayed close to the water, but she
knew much of his property was upstream as well.
 By the time she got back home, she was wet and exhausted,
with no more understanding than when she ventured out. Her
journey down the river had been a failure.
When she came to the grove of sourwood trees that grew
near the house, she finally slowed to a walk and caught her
breath, relieved to be back. As she made her way across the
open grass toward the porch, she glanced over to the meadow
where she sometimes saw Nathaniel standing by himself. And
there she stopped.
She gazed through the opening in the trees toward the
field, wondering.
Why did he go there?
Why that particular meadow?
If he was reluctant for her to see him crying, then why
didn’t he go into the barn or the mill where she could not
see him?
What refuge did the meadow provide his weeping soul?
Curious, she turned and walked toward the opening in the
trees.
To her surprise, the hair on her arms began to rise up.
Her temples began to pound.
Something was telling her to stop, to not go into the
meadow.
She paused, debating whether she should listen to the
warnings, but she didn’t want to stop.
She wanted toknow .
She walked into the center of the meadow, a small green
field dotted with purple fringed orchids. A lively flock of
chirping goldfinches and shimmering-blue buntings feasted on
the coneflowers that drooped in the long rays of the setting
sun.
Then she noticed something on the ground at the far end
of the meadow.
As she walked toward it, her heart beat slow and steady.
At first she could not make it out, for it lay in the
shade of an old, gnarled black cherry tree with long limbs
that hung low over the grass. But then she began to see.
Someone had laid stones on the ground in the shape of a
large rectangle. Inside the rectangle, there was a single
mound of dirt. The mound had been swept clean of sticks and
other debris, and it appeared as if someone had carefully
smoothed the dirt with their bare hands. Periwinkle and ivy
had been planted all around, and bunches of flowers from the
meadow and the nearby forest had been laid alongside. At the
end of the mound stood a cross made of wood. And beside that
cross there were three other crosses, side by side in the
grass, one after the other.
She swallowed.
Suddenly she felt very small, like a leaf floating in the
wind, without will or destiny, other than to just fall to the
ground.
These are human graves, she thought.
Each of the four crosses had a small wooden plaque carved
with day-folk markings. She stared at the markings for a long
time. But she could not read them. Suddenly, there was a part
of her that felt as separated from Nathaniel’s world as she
had ever been. But there was another part of her, deeper
down, that felt their connection, and knew that at this
moment in the flow of time there wasn’t another person in
the world who was closer to him than her. They had become
twins of the soul.
As she walked slowly back to the house, lost in her
thoughts, she knew she shouldn’t ask Nathaniel about the
graves.
She shouldn’t ask about the names that were on them.
She shouldn’t ask about what happened before she
arrived.
It would destroy everything.
T he next afternoon, when Nathaniel and Scout finally returned
from Gatlinburg, Scout dashed across the grass and ran up to
her, his tail wagging excitedly.
“Hello, Scout!” she said cheerfully as she knelt, put
her arms around him, and hugged him. “Welcome home!”
Her heart swelling, she glanced up to Nathaniel, but his
face was more worn and haggard than she had ever seen it. She
expected bright news of his journey, but when their eyes met,
he just shook his head in discouragement, and walked on
toward the house.
After putting his rifle and supplies away, he trudged
into the mill and went to work, clanking and banging, as if
he were smashing thoughts from his brain.
When he came out of the mill, he went to the woodpile and
split logs with his ax in a fit of violence, slamming his
blade down harder and harder with each chop until there were
no more logs to split.
That evening, as they sat across from each other at the
kitchen table and ate their dinner, she watched him warily,
wondering if his dark mood had passed.
He ate his venison piled high with a relish of mashed-up
squash, apples, and honey, and shoveled heaps of sweet corn
succotash into his mouth, but he made no comments and asked
no questions.
“The other day,” she said tentatively, “you were
making marks with a stick on the skin of a tree…”
“I was using a pencil to write letters on a piece of
paper,” he explained, and she could tell by his tone of
voice that he didn’t mind talking.
“What do the letters represent?” she asked. “Does each
one have a meaning?”
“No, not exactly,” he said as he cut another piece of
meat and put it in his mouth. “Each letter is a sound.”
“How can that be, when the skin of the tree is dead and
the letters are silent?”
“I’ll show you,” he said as he left the table and went
upstairs. She heard his boots as he walked down the length of
the hallway. He returned a few minutes later with a set of
wooden blocks.
A
“This is called an ,” he said, holding up one of the
letters. “It represents the sound ‘ah,’ like the word
apple. Each letter represents a sound that we write on the
paper so that people can understand what we’re saying to
them.”
 “Even though they are not there…” she said, amazed by
the magic of it.
Nathaniel nodded, pleased with her reaction, and picked
H
up another letter. “This one here is an . It makes a ‘hh’
sound, like at the beginning of the word home .”
“What is that one?” she asked, pointing to a letter
that looked like one she’d seen on the plaques by the
graves. It appeared to be a jumble of three sticks.
K
“That’s a , like at the beginning of the word kitten.
You see, the alphabet contains all the different sounds.”
Willa paused, trying to understand. “So…any word can be
made from these letters?”
“Yes.”
“What about Faeran words?”
“Yes, I reckon so.”
“What about the name Willa, how do you spell that?”
“W-I-L-L-A,” he said, then wrote the letters on the
paper so she could see what they looked like.
“And what about ‘Alliw’?”
He looked at her uncertainly. “Did you say, ‘Alley
Ew’?”
“Yes,” she said. “Alliw.”
“Is that a name?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the beginning of the name might be spelled A-L-L-
E-Y or A-L-L-I,” he said. “But I’m not sure about the
ending. Maybe an E-W or just a W. So it might be A-L-L-I-W.”
She watched as he carefully wrote the letters out with
his pencil for her to see.
She looked at the two names side by side.
W I L L A and A L L I W.
Twins, she thought. My sister and I were twins, even in
our sounds, in our letters, like the left hand and the right
hand painted on the wall in the cave.
“So how do you spell ‘Nea’?” she asked next.
 “I would imagine that would probably be N-E-A,” he
said, and wrote the letters down for her. “You see, you’ve
seen the A before, but the E and theN sounds are new. TheN
is ‘nn, nn.’ Do you hear it?”
“I hear it,” she nodded, mystified and satisfied at the
same time.
“Is this Nea a friend of yours?” he asked. “Maybe a
bumblebee or a squirrel?”
“No,” she said with a smile, knowing that he was joking
with her. “Nea was my mother. And Alliw was my sister.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I see,” he said. “They’re beautiful
names, Willa.”
He looked at her for several seconds, as if he wasn’t
sure if he should ask her more questions. “And they passed
away six years ago, is that right?” he asked tentatively.
“My parents and my sister died when I was six,” she
said, but did not say the rest, that it had been his people,
human beings, who had killed them.
“I’m so sorry, Willa,” he said, saying it with such
sympathy it was almost like he knew the truth of it.
Sometimes she wondered how they had been killed, why they
had been killed. Had it been the metal-clanging newcomers
with their saws and their axes? Had it been a homesteader
like him with a killing-stick? Whenever she tried to think
about her parents and her sister, she kept seeing images of
them running through the forest, and then the darkness of the
underworld of Dead Hollow.
Frightened, she tried to change the subject. “What about
the sound a bear makes when it’s happy because it’s found a
log full of honey or the voice of a tree when it whispers in
the wind? Can the Eng-lish letters make those sounds as
well?”
“Ah…” he said uncertainly. “I think you got me on
those. But most other sounds, you know, that folk like us
might make.”
Willa nodded, smiling.
 “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“ ‘Folk like us,’ ” she repeated. “I like that.”
He smiled in return, understanding. “So why all the
questions about letters all of a sudden? Do you want me to
teach you how to read?”
“As long as I can hear your voice, why would I need to
read?” she asked.
“It would let you hear other people’s voices, their
stories,” he said.
“Like who?”
“People who are no longer living or who live outside the
mountains.”
Willa tried to understand what Nathaniel was saying to
her. Could these letters of the Eng-lish truly bring voices
from outside the world? Could they truly bring back the
voices of people who had died?
“I’m not explaining it very well,” he said. “Let me
try again. People write things down, and then later other
people can read them. I might write down the story of what
has happened in my life. Or I might write down a story that I
imagine in my head. Or I might write a letter to someone who
lives in a different place, or a message to tell you how I
feel about something.”
Willa listened carefully to everything he said.
By the flickering light of a candle made from the wax of
the bees, they talked long into the night, of letters, and
sounds, and stories told.
Later, she sat in front of the fireplace with Scout lying
across her lap as he usually did and gazed into the glowing
embers of the sleeping fire. As Nathaniel roasted chestnuts
in a black iron skillet over the simmering coals, he
reminisced that he had learned how to farm vegetables and
plant trees from his father, how to cook meals and roast
chestnuts from his mother, and how to read and write from his
grandmamma. Many years ago, when he was growing up, they had
all lived in the house together.
 The following morning, when Nathaniel grabbed his rifle
and headed out on his daily journey down the river, she
wanted to tell him that she had gone down the river after him
while he was gone. But she didn’t.
She wanted to say,What are we looking for out there?
I’ve been down that river. There is nothing to find there.
But she didn’t. She didn’t question him or push him.
She didn’t want to upset him or anger him. There were no
more logs to split.
But she knew there was one thing she needed to tell him
before he left.
“I heard the loggers in the distance yesterday,” she
said.
“You heard them?” he asked.
“Far off, but getting closer,” she said.
“I understand,” he said, nodding gravely.
“So be careful,” she said, looking at him as steadily
as she could.
“I will,” he said, and then turned and began his
journey. The threat of the loggers had clearly disturbed him,
but he still had to go.
She watched Nathaniel disappear into the forest.
When she was sure he was gone, she went outside and
walked over to the meadow.
The morning mist was rising from the dew-covered grass,
and bright yellow swallowtail butterflies were fluttering
over the field of purple fringed orchids.
She stepped into the rectangle of stones, careful not to
disturb them, then sat down in front of the first cross. She
studied the letters that had been carved into the plaque.
The first letter she recognized.
“Apple,” she said.
The second letter looked like two vertical pine trees
with a horizontal branch in between them. She was pretty sure
that was the “hh” sound Nathaniel had told her about.
 The third looked like a two-twig sapling sprouting from
the ground.
The fourth looked like the moon.
The fifth was a kitten.
And the sixth was another apple.
She tried to sound out each letter one at a time, and
then she tried to blend them together. It came out sounding
like a garbled mess.
But as she sat beside the grave in the rectangle of
stones and studied the letters on the cross, she knew that
she could not give up.
The name was the path she must follow.
That evening, when the man Nathaniel returned from his
trek down the river, he looked bitterly defeated, his eyes
cast down and his teeth clenched, like he’d been walking all
day up and down the river, searching and searching but never
finding. As he came out of the forest his left hand gripped
his rifle, and his right hand opened and closed repeatedly
into a pumping fist.
He’s angry, she thought. He’s going to clank around the
mill or go cut down a tree with his ax or commit some other
act of violence. I’m sure of it.
But then, as he walked across the grass toward the house,
he lifted his eyes and saw her standing there on the front
porch.
The frustration and the fury lifted from the lines of his
face.
The change in his mood was like the passing of a storm
from the rocky heights of the Great Mountain. He looked at
her with his bright blue eyes—suddenly filled with something
that was not anger, and not rage, and not sadness—and he
said, “I’m glad to be home.”
T he next morning, when Nathaniel was gone, Willa sat cross-
legged on the ground beside the mound of dirt and the four
wooden crosses.
She had learned from her reading lessons with Nathaniel
that the sapling with the two leaves sticking out made the
sound at the beginning of the wordyearling . And the moon
sounded like the middle of the wordhope . So she thought she
finally had the letters she needed to decipher the first
plaque. She stared at it for a long time:
A H Y O K A

She sounded out the letters one by one. “Ah - ha - ya -

o - k - ah,” she said, but it didn’t sound right. She had
never heard of any kind of word or name that sounded like
that. She tried it again and again, but it was still
nonsense.
Frowning in frustration at the confusing mess of letters,
she studied the next plaque hoping that it would be easier:
I N A L I

She thought she had learned the sound of the little stick
at the beginning and end of this string of letters, and the
gorge with the mountain slope in between, and the apple, and
the sound of the bent branch in the fourth position. But she
thought she must be getting the letters and sounds mixed up,
because this didn’t look like any kind of name or word
she’d ever heard either.
Then she came to the longest of the names on the four
plaques. It appeared to be made up of the same sounds as the
other two words, but they were in a different order.
H I A L E A H

“Ha - i - a - la - ee - a - ha,” she stuttered slowly

through the sounds.
“Ha - i - a - lee - a,” she said again, this time
blending some of the sounds. It was beginning to sound
familiar to her ear.
“Hi - a - lee - a,” she said slowly, but gaining more
confidence.
Then she said it again, more quickly this time time. “Hi
- a - lee - a.”
She said it again, “Hi - a - lee - a.”
 And then she understood.
This wasn’t an Eng-lish word or name.
And it wasn’t Faeran, either.
It was Cherokee
.
She looked at the plaque on the first grave.
A H Y O K A

“Ah - yo - ka,” she said in the Cherokee way. She

couldn’t help but smile a little at the sound of it. It
sounded right. These could definitely be Cherokee names.
But then she drew more serious again, realizing what it
meant. Why? Why were there Cherokee names here? Most of the
Cherokee lived on the other side of the Great Mountain. Why
would there be Cherokee names in Nathaniel’s meadow?
She turned to the last of the four plaques and studied
it.
The stick.
The snake.
The kitten.
The apple.
She began to sound out the letters one by one.
And then she stopped, halfway through the name.
She did not need to go further.
She already knew what it said.
Her mind filled with a dark and cloudy fear. A feeling as
cold as death poured into her chest.
She had made a terrible mistake.
W illa studied the letters on the fourth plaque one by one:

I S K A G U A

It was a long name, and she didn’t know the sounds for
all of the letters. But she knew the first four.
“Iska…”
When she said the name out loud, it broke her heart.
 It was the name of the Cherokee boy that she’d met in
the Dead Hollow prison. And it was too unusual of a name for
it to be a coincidence. It was him.
The cookies, she thought. That’s all I did for him. I
fed him cookies!
She had been frightened to see a human boy imprisoned in
a hole. She had run away from him. She hadn’t wanted to see
him. She hadn’t wanted to think about him. She hadn’t
understood why he was there, why they had captured him, and
she still didn’t. But she’d been able to put it out of her
mind. He was a human
, nothing she was allowed to concern
herself with, nothing she was allowed to help. That was what
she had told herself.
But now, she knew so much more than she had before. She
had experienced so much since then.
Her palms began to sweat and her stomach churned. Her
mind clouded with shame and confusion. He was a living
person. How could she have done what she did? She had left
the boy lying in a prison cell in the lair of the night-
spirits. How could she abandon him in that place? How could
she let him suffer like that? How could she let him die?
She’d been taught all her life that humans were her enemy,
killers of the forest, murderers of her people. But how could
she let anyone suffer like that?
As children, she and Alliw had saved the sparrows that
had fallen from the tree. And she had healed Luthien from the
wound of a hunter’s gun. And she helped the panther. What
kind of fear and hatred had lived so deep in her heart that
she could abandon a human boy to rot in a dark, wet prison?
She couldn’t move her body. And her mind went numb. All
she could do was stare at the boy’s name on the plaque above
the grave. Iska, she thought. His name was Iska. She knew he
had probably died in the prison cell where she had left him.
He had probably died because of what she did.
But her brows furrowed and she rubbed her eyes, her mind
filled with intense confusion.
 How did Iska and those other children end up in the
prison of the Dead Hollow lair?
She thought about the woodpecker she had disentangled
from the fragments of a net, and the band of Cherokee
searching for their children near the devastation of the
loggers, and the net-traps she’d seen in the forest on the
other side of the river.
She knew the padaran was sending his jaetters out to hunt
and trap the animals of the forest for bounty. Had he sent
his guards down into the valleys to hunt for human children
as well? But why?
And if that was what happened, if Iska was captured by
the night-spirits and then died in that prison, how did his
body get back here to this grave? Did his body come floating
down the river? Why were these Cherokee people buried in
Nathaniel’s meadow?
Her mind swirled back into the past. When she saw Iska in
the prison cell, could she have saved him? Could she have
gotten him out? She’d barely been able to get herself out of
the Dead Hollow lair. But she hadn’t even tried to save him,
she thought in shame.
She rubbed her face in agony. But she couldn’t let her
mind get pulled into the painful, twisting darkness of
everything she’d done and hadn’t done, all the terrible
mistakes she’d made. She had to think about what she was
going to do now. What did all this mean?
One thing was certain. She couldn’t pretend any longer
that she didn’t know anything, that there was no connection
between the past and the present, between the life she had
led before and the life she was leading now. She couldn’t
hide behind the rocks of unknowing. She had to talk to
Nathaniel.
She wiped her eyes, got up onto her feet, and ran toward
the house.
W hen Willa arrived, Nathaniel wasn’t there. His rifle was
leaning by the door, so she knew he must be nearby. She
looked for him in the mill house and the barn, but he was
nowhere to be found. Noticing that his beekeeping equipment
was gone, she headed out to the clover field.
On her way there, a bee buzzed past her face.
“Hey! What’s the hurry?” she shouted to the speeding
bee.
 Then three more bees started buzzing around her, angry
and agitated. One landed on her arm and immediately stung
her.
“Ow!” she complained, pushing it away. “What’d you do
that for? That’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurt
me!”
As she approached the hives, the loud buzzing noise of
the bees seemed to be filled with an intense, all-consuming
malevolence. The vibration of the enraged insects ran up and
down her spine as they swarmed all around.
Nathaniel, in his bee suit, worked over the hives,
clearly trying to figure out what was happening. He had taken
several of the structures apart and was looking inside them.
When Willa gazed in, she gasped.
Once there had been order—with every worker bee
performing her job to collect pollen, feed the brood, care
for the queen, and protect the hive—but now it had descended
into pandemonium. Hundreds of bees were attacking one
another, their mandibles chomping in violence and their legs
entangling in fierce battles.
“Can you make them stop, Willa?” Nathaniel asked her,
his voice filled with desperation.
Willa tried to speak to them in the old language, tried
to soothe them with her voice, but the bees wouldn’t listen.
They were swarming in a mindless riot of killing.
“There’s the queen!” Nathaniel said, pointing toward
the bee that had a much longer abdomen than the others.
“Get out of there, queen!” Willa called to her.
Normally the worker bees gave deference to the queen,
moved out of her way whenever she was crawling, and turned to
face her when she stopped. They pampered her, fed her, and
cared for her in every way. But now Willa and Nathaniel
watched in grotesque fascination as the worker bees
surrounded and murdered their queen.
All five of the hives fell into chaos. Hundreds of bees
swarmed in wild, erratic circles all around. A worker bee
stung Willa, and then two more attacked as well. Others flew
off into the forest alone where they would soon die without
the rest of their hive. All order had broken down, and for
the bees that meant death. They could only survive by working
together.
Nathaniel stood helplessly over the hives, his arms
hanging uselessly at his side, his head hanging down, and his
expression a tight grimace.
“What caused them to turn on their queen?” Willa asked
him, her mind filled with confusion, not just about the bees,
but about the names on the graves in the distant meadow.
“I don’t know. Maybe some sort of putrefaction in the
honey or a corruption of the hive,” he said as he watched
the last of the bees crawling across the killing field of the
honeycomb, murdered bodies strewn all around them. “It’s a
total loss. They’re almost all dead, and those few who
survive won’t last long.”
As Willa and Nathaniel trudged glumly back to the house,
Nathaniel didn’t say a word. She was anxious to talk to him
about the graves in the meadow, but he stared at the ground
as he walked, dispirited like she’d never seen him. She
didn’t know why, or what to say to him, but she put her hand
in his to let him know that she was there.
When he gripped her hand in return, she felt the urgency
of it, the gratefulness that she was there with him, and a
rush of emotion poured through her.
In that moment, as they walked back toward the house, she
began to feel in her heart the answers to the puzzles that
her mind could not work out. As she realized what was
happening, it felt like her chest was expanding with air.
“You weren’t the one who started those beehives…” she
said slowly.
“No,” he said glumly.
“You were taking care of them for someone else…”
He nodded slowly as they walked, but he did not speak.
 “Did the bees belong to Ahyoka?” she asked gently,
using the name for the first time.
The name, saying it out loud between them, with respect
and care, was like a bridge over a dark and turbulent river.
He sighed, as if he knew the time had finally come.
“Yes,” he said. “The bees were Ahyoka’s.”
“And she was Cherokee…”
Nathaniel nodded again. “Ahyoka was a respected member
of the Paint clan, the great-great-granddaughter of a famous
chief.”
Here he paused, as if he was uncertain whether he could
continue through the emotion roiling through him. “And
Ahyoka was the love of my life,” he said finally, his voice
cracking.
“The love of your life…” Willa repeated in a whisper
of amazement. They were not words that she had ever heard in
the Dead Hollow lair, but she knew in her soul what they
meant.
“Ahyoka and I were married for fifteen years,”
Nathaniel said.
As Willa gazed at him, all the connections came together
in her mind like the water of the three rivers becoming one.
Suddenly she could see all the pieces of the broken world.
“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked, seeing the troubled
expression on her face.
“How did Ahyoka die?” she asked, her voice trembling.
Nathaniel shook his head in discouragement. The wrinkled
lines around his mouth and the pain in his eyes seemed to be
filled with anger, sadness, and guilt all at once.
“I’ve been fighting the railroad and the loggers in
every way I can,” he said, “filing complaints with the
county sheriff, disrupting town meetings, and trying to
organize the other homesteaders to make a stand against
them.”
“And your land…” she said.
 “That’s right,” he said. “The loggers have come to
hate me, but to make matters worse, my land here on the river
blocks their path upstream, so they’re unable to take their
railroad farther up the mountain. They’ve been sending their
enforcers up here, threatening me and my family, scaring off
my livestock, sabotaging my mill, doing everything they can
to shut me up or drive me out.”
“But why? Why have they come here into our mountains?”
Willa asked in dismay.
“They’re enterprisers, businessmen,” Nathaniel said.
“They’ve cut down all the forests up in the north, so now
they’re moving through the Southern mountains. They’re
meaning to come up here to Clingmans Dome and cut these
trees, too.”
“Which trees?”
“All of them,” he said in disgust. “They’re clear
cutters. They don’t believe in picking and choosing, letting
some grow and harvesting others. They take them all.”
Willa swallowed hard, remembering the destruction.
“I’ve seen it,” she said.
“Then you know what I’m talking about,” he said.
“That’s where all this began.”
He shook his head again, holding his lips tightly
together and breathing through his nose, as if he was trying
to find the strength to continue.
“I started a fight I couldn’t win,” he said, his voice
grave and laced with regret. She could see that he was
berating himself, racked with not just sadness but guilt.
There were so many questions swirling through her mind,
and so many things she wanted to tell him, but through all
that, all she could feel in her heart was a deep and abiding
sorrow for what Nathaniel had been through. She could see
that it had been bad. It had been unbearable to him.
She knew she didn’t want to hear the story, but she held
on to his arm, and said, “Tell me what happened to your
wife…”
N athaniel stopped walking and turned slowly toward her. She
thought he was going to look at her, but his head stayed
down.
“A whole gang of them came into the house in the middle
of the night,” he said, his voice low and struggling.
“There must have been twenty or thirty of them…” As he was
talking, he just stared at the ground and shook his head, as
if he was living through it all again in his mind. “Ahyoka
and I tried to fight them. I got off several shots. I think I
killed at least two of them, then tore into them with my
fists. Scout got hold of one them, too. I’ve never seen him
fight so hard…But it was so dark, and then four of them
grabbed hold of me…”
When his words faltered and dwindled down to silence,
Willa slowly touched his arm to let him know that she was
still there for him, still listening.
He raised his eyes and looked at her. “I tried to fight
back,” he told her. “I tried to save Ahyoka. I tried to
save my children! But one of the attackers stabbed me with
some sort of pike or spear, and the other hit me in the head
with a club and I went down hard…”
He pressed his lips together and stared back down at the
ground, pulling air in through his nose. Finally, he said,
“Then I was out…”
“Your children…” Willa said, her voice catching in her
throat. That was what she had heard: He had said, I tried to
save my children.
“I’ve gone through it in my mind a thousand times,” he
continued, “but I don’t know what happened next. When I
came to, it was morning, and my wife and children were
gone.”
A sickening feeling welled in Willa’s stomach. She had
to make sure that she truly understood what had happened. She
had to hear the words in her ears, not just see the Eng-lish
letters scratched on plaques of wood in the meadow.
“What were your children’s names, Nathaniel?” she
asked him. “Tell me their names.”
“My daughter Hialeah was twelve years old, so strong and
brave. I remember hearing her screaming in the other room,
fighting to protect her little brothers.”
Nathaniel paused, unable to continue for a moment. Willa
felt her heart pumping pulses of blood through her body as
she waited for the name she knew would come.
 “My little baby boy, Inali, was just five years old. And
my oldest boy was ten. We named him in honor of his great-
great-grandfather. His name was Iskagua.”
Willa knew he was going to say the name before he said
it, but her stomach still tightened at the sound of it.
“Iska…” Willa whispered in despair.
She closed her eyes against the tears, just trying to
breathe as intense heat filled her face with pain. She wanted
to cry, to turn away and hide. It seemed so long ago, like a
different world, like a different her. But she had left
Nathaniel’s son in the prison. She had left him there with
the spear-stabbing guards and the teeth-chattering jaetters.
Iska had been Nathaniel’s son, and she had just left him
there to die!
“Why did you say his name like that?” Nathaniel asked
her. “That’s what we called him. We called him Iska.”
“I know…” she said, her heart breaking.
How could she tell him that she’d seen his son alive,
that she had actually talked to him, but that she had
abandoned him in a dark, vile prison to die alone? Her mind
swam with confusion and guilt and fear. There were still so
many things she didn’t understand.
“Tell me what happened next,” she said, looking up at
Nathaniel. “What happened when you discovered your wife and
children were gone?”
“I looked all over the house for them. I thought maybe
they had escaped or hid someplace. I knew that Ahyoka would
never give up fighting for the children. And Hialeah was a
very resourceful girl. But Scout kept barking and pulling on
me, telling me he was onto something.”
“Onto what?” she asked.
“He could smell them,” he said. “When he ran out the
front door, I followed close. We tracked their scent across
the yard and down to the river. And then, when we reached the
bank, I saw…”
 Nathaniel choked on his words so hard that he had to stop
midway through his sentence.
He pressed his face into his hands, pulled in a long,
deep breath, and then exhaled.
“I’ve never felt pain like that in all my life…” he
said so softly that she almost couldn’t hear it. “I
remember I collapsed onto my knees…”
“Tell me, Nathaniel…” Willa urged him.
“The stones of the riverbank were spattered with blood,
and my children’s clothing lay all over the ground. That’s
when I realized what the attackers had done…”
“What?” Willa asked in dismay. “What did they do?”
“They killed them all and threw their bodies into the
river,” he said.
“I…” she began to say, but her words faltered. She was
too shocked to speak.
“They killed them all,” he said again, as if it was
necessary for him to feel the full pain of it.
“The night I broke into your house…” she said.
“I wasn’t in my right mind,” he said. “And I haven’t
been since.”
“Down the river…” she said. “That’s where you’ve
been going every day.”
“That first morning, I started searching for them. I
found my wife downstream, her body pinned against a rock
under the water. I had to use a rope and pulley to get her
out. I nearly drowned in the process. There was a point when
the river was trying to pull me under that I wanted it to
win. I wanted to let the river take me like it took her. I
wanted to get out of this world.”
“But you didn’t,” she said softly, trying to find some
hope in that.
“I couldn’t ,” he said. “I hadn’t found my
children’s bodies, so I couldn’t go. Not yet. I couldn’t
stand the idea of my children in that cold water. When I
finally got Ahyoka out of the river, I carried her home, dug
a grave in the meadow, and buried her. I kept her wedding
ring because I knew she’d want me to have that, for us to be
together.”
“Tell me what happened to your children…” Willa said.
“I was exhausted after digging Ahyoka’s grave, but I
went back out and continued the search for my children’s
bodies. I’ve been looking for them every day since, scouring
the banks of the river and the whirlpools and the deepest
holes, but it feels like every day I don’t find them they
slip farther away from me.”
Nathaniel slowly shook his head. “I’m at a point where
nothing has any meaning anymore, where it’s time for me to
leave this world, but I can’t. I can’t think straight. I
can’t do anything. I’ll find no peace in my life, or in my
death, until I find their bodies and can bury them beside
their mother.”
“But there are four crosses…” she said.
“I couldn’t let them go, couldn’t accept a world
without them. It just didn’t feel real. So I had a memorial
service for them, just Scout and me, trying to come to terms
with what had happened. I put the crosses next to Ahyoka’s
and I prayed for their souls like I had found their bodies,
like it was a real funeral. I thought that might help me to
accept that they were gone, but it didn’t…”
Willa held his hands in hers as she listened to the words
pouring out of him.
“It just makes me angry,” he said. “Those loggers are
still out there, still slashing down trees. I heard their
infernal machines on the other side of the river this
morning. Their scouting crews are getting closer every day. I
haven’t been able to stop them legally, but if they come
anywhere near my land, I’m gonna raise a living hell like
they’ve never seen. I went down to Gatlinburg looking for
justice for my wife and children, but when I accused the
railroaders and the loggers, the sheriff turned stone cold.
He didn’t believe a word of what I told him. He looked at me
like I was crazy. Most of those men down there are bought and
paid for, too many people making good wages with the railroad
and the lumber company to let anything get in the way of it.
Their enforcers have started spreading rumors that they saw
me beating my wife and hurting my children. Now the sheriff
is investigating me for the crime of what happened to my
family.”
As she listened to his story, a thick and heavy feeling
caught deep in Willa’s throat. In this one moment, it felt
as if she could see all the broken pieces of the world in a
way that no one else could. And one of those broken pieces
was her.
She knew that what Nathaniel thought happened hadn’t
happened. The loggers hadn’t been the ones who attacked his
family. And what the detectives thought happened hadn’t
happened, either. Like the two men arguing whether the earth
was flat or round, they were both wrong. The world was
mountains.
But how could she tell Nathaniel that her own people had
attacked his family? How could she tell him that she had seen
Iska in a night-spirit prison and left him to die? If she
told him what really happened, he’d go through the cruel
pain of Iska’s death all over again. It would destroy what
little was left of his clinging soul. And it would shatter
the life that she and Nathaniel had shared together for these
last few weeks.
She racked her mind trying to figure out if it was in any
way possible that Iska could still be alive, that he could
have somehow survived in the prison all this time. Why were
the night-spirits capturing and killing human beings? What
use did the padaran have for children?
She tried to think back to what she’d seen in the lair.
Who was the bronze-faced/gray-faced padaran, the god of the
clan? How was he able to hold such terrible power over those
who had once been such a good and honorable people?
 She was so deep in the convolution of her own thoughts
that when the dog burst into a fit of wild barking she jumped
in surprise.
“What is it, boy?” Nathaniel asked Scout as the dog
carried on barking, staring out into the forest.
Willa’s ear twitched. “Wait,” she said, touching
Nathaniel’s arm to hold him still. “I hear it now, too.”
It was faint, but she could definitely hear the sound in
the distance.
Thud. Thud. Thud…
“What are you hearing?” Nathaniel said, the tension
rising in his voice.
The incessant pattern of the sound seeped into Willa’s
chest like black leeches.Thud. Thud. Thud…
“I hear axes…” she whispered.
Nathaniel’s face filled with anger. “It’s those
godforsaken loggers!”
He started walking fast toward the house, more upset than
she’d ever seen him.
“What are you going to do?” Willa asked in a panic as
she hurried to catch up with him. He was in no condition to
confront the loggers.
Nathaniel stormed into the house, threw down his
beekeeping equipment, and grabbed his gun.
“Come on, Willa,” he said as he charged out of the
house and headed into the forest. “We’re going after
them.”
N athaniel stormed out of the trees, gripping his loaded rifle
in his hands, and bore down on the loggers. Scout charged
with him, growling viciously. But Willa stayed in the
undergrowth. She wasn’t a fighter or a killer. She couldn’t
threaten or shout or intimidate. She’d be lucky if they
could even see her.
A crew of twenty stubble-faced, hard-bitten lumbermen had
come with horses and a wagon full of saws, mauls, chains, and
axes. They had already felled one beautiful black cherry
tree. Half a dozen axmen were chopping off its limbs as the
teamsters harnessed the horses. Two men with a six-foot-long,
jagged-tooth saw had already cut halfway through the trunk of
a second tree, an old oak that looked as if it had stood for
more than 150 years.
“Stop!” Nathaniel shouted. “This is my land! You have
no right to cut these trees!”
One of the men, gripping his ax, walked up to Nathaniel,
and shouted, “It’s a free country, ain’t it!” into his
face.
“We can do anything we feel like,” another man said as
he chopped the limbs of the tree. “Isn’t that what freedom
means?”
“You don’t have a permit to cut here,” Nathaniel said.
An older man, grizzled and one-eyed, spat out a dark
brown stream of chewing tobacco onto the ground. “We don’t
need no stinking permit.”
“I’m Nathaniel Steadman,” he said, facing off with the
boss of the crew. “I own this land.”
“It’s forest,” the boss said. “No one owns the
forest. It’s public land. Free for taking.”
Willa’s muscles tensed as several of the other lumbermen
walked up to stand in front of Nathaniel beside the boss.
They weren’t going to back down.
“Ain’t Nathaniel Steadman the name of the man who done
beat his wife and killed her?” one of the lumbermen said.
“Is that true?” the boss asked, squinting at
Nathaniel’s face. “That you? You kill your wife?”
“No, I didn’t kill my wife!” Nathaniel said. “You
can’t just come in here and start cutting!”
“Who says I can’t?” the boss said. “You? How you
gonna stop me?”
“I’ve got a God-given right to protect my land,”
Nathaniel said, brandishing his rifle.
 The man standing next to the boss slammed the butt of his
ax into Nathaniel’s face.
Willa’s whole body jolted with the shock of it. She
lurched forward to help Nathaniel, as he toppled to the
ground.
Scout charged in and bit the attacker, but the man kicked
the dog in the head and swung his ax at him. Scout leapt back
and dodged the blade, then sprang forward and clamped onto
the man’s wrist, snarling and biting.
Nathaniel tried to scramble back up onto his feet, but
three of the men rushed in. They kicked him in the sides and
punched him with their tightened fists. They struck him with
the handles of their tools.
Willa cried out and tried to block their blows, but there
was nothing she could do. They beat him, one punch after
another. She felt every blow against Nathaniel’s head like
it was against her own. Every kick to his side struck her
ribs.
With tears smeared across her face and anger welling up
inside her, she threw herself to the ground on all fours and
gripped the thick roots of the nearby trees.
“If you want to live, then you must help us!” she
shouted in the old language. There was no kindness in her
voice, no compassion. She was demanding this, screaming at
the trees. “I know you can help him! Do it now or you’re
all going to die from the cuts of their axes!”
Driven by sheer desperation, Willa focused her mind down
into the ground beneath her. She drew upon everything her
mamaw had taught her of the forest and the trees and the flow
of the world. She intertwined all that she had learned on her
own of the tendrils of growth and the bend of limbs. And she
reached deep into her woodland spirit, weaving the most
powerful woodcraft she could imagine in her mind. The earth,
the water, the root. The trunk, the branch, the leaf. It was
all hers. She called out a string of old Faeran words that
had never had a meaning in the Eng-lish and never would. They
were the ancient phrases of her people, the summons of her
ancestors to rouse the ire of the trees, to bring movement to
roots that hadn’t moved in a hundred years.
The tree roots that ran along the ground all around her
and beneath the feet of the lumbermen began to vibrate in
agitation. The roots creaked and bent, pushing against the
ground around them. Then the roots broke up through the earth
like long, quivering, clutching fingers. Willa sucked in a
startled breath, astonished by what she had done. She pushed
into her fear and carried on. The roots of the trees were
moving to her command, like slithering snakes from the
ground, twisting and grasping, trying to touch everything
around them. They were the mireroots, the primeval spirits of
the trees, coming to life.
As the earth itself erupted around them, the eyes of the
lumbermen went wide with terror. Their faces filled with
expressions of shock. The writhing roots coiled around their
legs, clamping onto knees and calves. The branches of the
forest trees thrashed back and forth above their heads as if
angered by a violent storm.
One of the men tripped backward and fell. The mireroots
intertwined his arms, his legs, his throat, sucking the life
and nutrients out of him like he was the earth itself. His
skin withered and cracked, his fingers shriveled into broken
twigs, and his eyes turned into black seeds of what they had
been.
The other men shouted and screamed, and tried to flee. In
a fit of wild panic, one lumberman swung at a mireroot with
an ax, but the blade ricocheted away and struck deep into the
shin bone of his companion. The man shrieked in agonizing
pain and collapsed into the clutching death of the mireroots
as the other men backed away in horror.
Several of the men leapt onto horses and galloped away.
Others just ran. But the one-eyed boss pulled the rifle from
his horse’s saddle and aimed at Nathaniel, thinking he was
the cause of all that was happening. Scout charged forward
and leapt at the man just as he pulled the trigger.
W illa watched in relief as the terrified loggers fled in
panic, tearing away by foot and by horse.
When they were finally gone, she let go of the tree roots
and collapsed to the ground in exhaustion.
She lay in the dirt, shaking and gasping for breath, just
holding on to the steadiness of the earth.
The branches of the trees stopped thrashing.
The roots retreated slowly back into the ground.
 The screaming storm of violence that had filled the world
just moments before faded into an eerie silence.
The badly wounded Nathaniel lay on the ground a few feet
away, cradling his dog’s limp body in his arms.
“No, not you, Scout,” Nathaniel cried as he hugged his
dog to his chest.
There was blood and bruises all over Nathaniel’s face
and head, and she knew he must be in terrible pain, but he
wrapped his arms around his dog and held him.
“Not you, boy, not you!” he wept as he stroked Scout’s
head.
And then Nathaniel looked over at her and met her eyes.
“We’ve got to help him, Willa. We’ve got to help him…”
But Willa knew it was too late.
The logger’s gun had done its damage.
Scout’s spirit was gone.
The last living member of Nathaniel’s family was dead,
taken from him by the forces of the world.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as she wrapped her arms around
Nathaniel. “I can’t save him.” And Nathaniel wrapped his
arms around her in return, holding her like she had never
been held—holding her as if she were the very last being on
earth he could hold on to.
A fter a long time lying on the ground with Nathaniel and
Scout, Willa rose, and she pulled Nathaniel slowly up onto
his feet. She put her shoulder under his arm and they limped
back to the house in silence.
As he slumped down, bloody and wounded, into his bed, she
tried to say gentle words to him that might soothe him, that
might help him through the pain of his loss, but she knew
that her words meant nothing. Nathaniel had suffered too
much. He’d lost his wife, his children, and now his dog.
She wanted to tell him that she’d seen Iska alive, to
give him hope, to give him something he could cling to. But
she knew she couldn’t. Not at this moment. Not like this.
After all the time that had passed, Iska was probably dead by
now. She couldn’t hurt Nathaniel with this new uncertainty,
this new pain, the agony of knowing that he might have been
able save his son if he’d only known where he was.
As she thought about what to do, she went out and
gathered seal berries and herbs from the forest. When she
returned, she applied poultices to his bloody cuts and
bruises, trying to help him in any way she could.
He lay in the bed without moving, his eyes glazed with
hopelessness.
She wondered again whether she should tell him about what
she had seen in the prison. She knew it wasn’t right to hide
what she knew from him. But if she told him about seeing Iska
in the night-spirt lair, he’d drag his bleeding, damaged
body up onto his feet, grab his rifle, and head up the
mountain to find his son. It would be impossible to stop him.
He’d go with or without her. But there was no way he could
make it up through the ravines and ridges to Dead Hollow. And
she couldn’t bear the thought of him collapsing in
exhaustion and lying dead and alone among the rocks. She
couldn’t bear the thought of the jaetters getting hold of
him the way they had her grandmother.
But as she wet a rag and cleaned the dirt and blood from
the wound on Nathaniel’s head, she was already beginning to
see what she must do.
She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to leave. She
didn’t want to go back up there to that dark place. She knew
she was probably going to die. And if, by some thread of
strength, Iska was still alive, and by the grace of the Great
Mountain she managed to get him back to his father, then she
knew what would happen next. And it would break her heart.
 From what she’d seen and experienced all her life in the
withered lair of Dead Hollow, love was a rare and tenuous
thing, families small and fragile and dying. Love was a thing
that shattered. It was a thing that could not last.
She had finally found in Nathaniel a place for her heart
to live. And it felt like a shaded, magical forest dell
unlike any other. But if she succeeded in returning Iska to
him, and maybe even his other children if they were still
alive, then she knew everything would change. Nathaniel would
have his real family back, his human family, the family he’d
been searching for and yearning for. The family he truly
loved. His need for her and her strange night-spirit ways
would fade away like mist from the top of the mountain, all
around her in one moment, then drifting away in the next, as
if the Great Mountain was saying,You’ve had enough now,
little one. It’s time for you to go… And she knew it was a
pain she could not bear.
But despite what was going to happen, she knew in her
heart that she had to go.
Nathaniel lay in his bed, broken and wounded, body and
soul, mourning not just his dog Scout but his beloved wife
and children. Willa knew that one way or another, whether she
lived or died up on the mountain, whether she succeeded or
failed, this would be the last time she would ever see him,
the last time she would ever touch his shoulder with her
hand, or hear his voice.
As the man Nathaniel’s eyes finally drifted shut and he
fell into a troubled sleep, she wanted to say Thank you to
him, thank you for all that he had done for her, for the
kindness he’d shown her that first night in the barn and
every day they’d been together since. And she wanted to say
how sorry she was about everything that had happened, what
had come before, and what had come after.
But as she turned and went downstairs, she couldn’t find
a way to say any of these words, or express any of these
feelings, in the new language or the old. And although he had
taught her some of the Eng-lish letters, she did not yet know
how to write the sounds of feelings on the skin of trees.
So she walked outside alone, made her way across the
grass, and disappeared into the forest.
It was just the way she had come.
W illa followed the edge of the river like she had many times
before, but traveling upstream now, against the flow of fate,
against the flow of time, back toward the world she came
from.
She made her way high up into the mountains, through the
darkening forest as the mist rose up into the moonlit trees
and the owls took wing.
 Hours later, she finally came to the rocky gorge that led
into Dead Hollow.
The Watcher—the weathered carcass of the upside-down
tree wedged between the narrow walls of the ravine—loomed
over the path, a black guardian against the enemies of the
clan.
And tonight, that’s me, she thought.
She had told herself that she’d never come back to this
dark and wretched place. But here she was again. She wanted
to turn away, to skulk back down the mountain and slip
quietly into her soft cocoon hanging in Nathaniel’s room.
She wanted to go back to Scout and pet his ears, and run and
play with him in the soaring groves of trees. But she knew
she couldn’t. Her life with Nathaniel and Scout had been
destroyed by four symbols on a piece of wood and a logger’s
gun.
She had no choice now. She knew what she had to do. But
she felt the weight of it in the pit of her stomach as she
watched bands of jaetters and guards moving in and out of the
entrance of the Dead Hollow lair like hornets around a nest.
It struck her how the members of her clan always ventured
out of the lair in groups. There is no I, only we. But when
she had been a thieving jaetter she liked to go out on her
own, to use her own skills and make her own decisions. She
hadn’t even realized at the time how much that had set her
apart from the others, how infuriating and incomprehensible
it had been to Gredic, and how suspicious it had seemed to
the padaran.
Now there is an I, she thought.I, the woodwitch, the
weaver, the jaetter, the thief. Move without a sound, steal
without a trace. That’s what I’m going to do, steal without
a trace, just like old times.
But as she gazed at the Watcher, she knew if she walked
in through the front entrance of the lair they’d swarm her
and kill her on sight.
 And she suspected that the prison guards had probably
found the crack in the stone she had used the last time. They
were probably guarding it or had blocked it off. It was no
use to her now.
This time, she needed a different way in. Something
small. Something quiet. And something that would reserve her
strength for the battles to come. One of the things she had
learned as a jaetter was that nights of thieving were long
and filled with many perils.
She pulled back into the forest and headed for a nearby
stream to find some help.
A short time later, she crept through the dripping
understory of the blackened trees that grew along the back
walls of the lair. The shuffling, tail-dragging movement of
her new allies followed just behind her.
When she finally came to the spot that she thought was
nearest to the prison, she whispered “Here” in the old
language, touching her fingers to the base of the wall.
The two beavers moved forward and started chewing, chomp
after chomp with their sharp, strong teeth, cutting their way
through the thick layers of interwoven sticks.
Three of the beaver colony’s young kits, and two of the
adults, had been trapped and killed by the jaetters for the
bounty on their fur since she had last visited the colony. It
seemed impossible, but the Faeran of the Dead Hollow clan,
who had once lived in harmony with all living things, had
become their gravest enemy.
“Thank you, my friends,” she whispered when they
finished boring a small hole through the wall for her to fit
through. “It’s going to get bad from here on, so you better
get back to your lodge. Stay safe.”
As she crawled on her hands and knees through the dark,
slimy hole, her stomach tightened. She loathed the smell of
it, the closed-in feeling of it. But how could she have
stayed with Nathaniel knowing what she knew? How could she
abandon Iska to the night-spirit guards if he was still
alive? He was Nathaniel’s son!
She crawled through several feet of densely layered
sticks, then finally made it through to the other side.
She slowly peeked her head out and looked around. The
hole hadn’t brought her directly into the prison but into
one of the lower tunnels of the lair. She checked one way and
then the other for any signs of the guards. For now, her path
looked clear.
Move without a sound. Steal without a trace, she thought
again as she crept carefully out of the hole and crouched
down to the floor.
She stayed very still, listening for the faintest sounds
in the distance, her quills oscillating, ready to detect the
slightest movement coming in her direction. Every sense in
her body was tuned to the take.
She dashed up the tunnel quickly and quietly, scanning
ahead. She reached one turn and then another, making her way
toward the prison.
It was hard to imagine that the boy Iska had survived
very long in the cruel conditions she had seen him in. The
prison guards had seemed determined to make sure he wouldn’t
last. The small hole they had crammed him into hadn’t been
much larger than his curled body, and the guards hadn’t even
been feeding him.
It seemed even less likely that his brother and sister
had survived. She’d seen no signs of them at all.
But she had no choice now. For Nathaniel’s sake, one way
or another, whether they were alive or dead, she had to
figure out what had happened to them, or Nathaniel would
drive himself insane searching up and down the river for
their bodies.
If she could somehow find Iska in the prison and escape
with him, it would be the greatest take a jaetter had ever
achieved, to steal a human being right out from under the
noses of the night-spirit clan.
 She came to a corridor where she could hear the sounds of
footsteps and voices just ahead. She stayed close to the
wall, and moved slowly forward.
As she peered around the corner, a guard ran toward her,
spear in hand. She threw herself to the wall, wove herself
in, and disappeared just as the guard ran past her.
Before she could even take a breath, two more guards came
down the corridor dragging a screaming human girl behind
them. The girl flailed her body in wild, jerking motions,
lurching one way and then the other, trying to escape the
guards, but the guards had clamped onto her wrists with their
bony hands and would not let her go.
“What’s wrong with this one?” the larger of the two
guards asked, as they dragged the girl down the corridor.
“It keeps trying to escape,” the other guard said.
“Lorcan said that it wasn’t cooperating, so we should throw
it into the abyss.”
Willa watched in horror as they pulled the screaming girl
away.
They were taking her toward the labyrinth where they
would heave her into the black void of the bottomless pit and
she would never be seen again.
Willa’s fists tightened and her jaw clenched. A
desperate need to help the girl welled up inside her. But she
didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t leap out in front of
the guards and suddenly overpower them. She felt so helpless.
Get what you came for, she told herself fiercely, trying
to focus her mind.Find your take and go.
She moved deeper into the prison, sneaking unseen and
unheard from shadow to shadow, blending here and darting
there. She soon found herself surrounded by wailing, captured
children crammed into prison cells up and down the corridor,
guards shouting at them through the lattices in the cell
doors. Some of the children were wounded and weak, others
strong and defiant and fighting back. But what struck her was
that the humans were still here—and at least some of them
were still alive.
It seemed as if the guards were holding the various
prisoners in different types of cells, feeding some
extravagantly and starving others, talking to certain
children in kind words, but then isolating the others in
total darkness. She couldn’t figure out why the guards were
doing all this. But somehow, it felt strangely familiar to
her. There was something about it that reminded her too
keenly of her own nightmares.
Just get what you came for, she told herself again, and
tried to continue on. You’re a thief. Find your take and go.
Deeper down in the prison, where there were no guards,
she followed a long, winding tunnel with dozens of cells no
larger than holes for curled-up bodies. Little human fingers
reached out through the lattices of woven sticks as she went
by. She tried to push her way through the dark, nightmarish
confusion, but the sounds and smells were unbearable.
Finally, she came to the cell she was looking for, where
she had fed Iska the cookies.
She crouched down and peered into the darkness of the
hole. The body of a young, dark-haired boy lay crumpled on
the floor.
“Wake up,” Willa whispered into the cell.
But the boy did not reply.
“Iska, wake up!” she whispered again, louder this time.
But the boy in the cell did not move.
She looked up the corridor, knowing that a guard could
come running in her direction at any moment, and then she
turned back to the cell.
“Iska, it’s me, it’s Willa,” she said. “You’ve got
to get up. We’ve got to go!”
But still the crumpled shape in the cell did not move.
She felt her world starting to close in, the heat rising
to her face, and it was getting more and more difficult to
breathe.
 Her hand trembled as she reached slowly into the darkness
of the cell to touch the body.
“I ska…” she said again as she put her hand on the boy’s
shoulder. But he did not respond.
She shook him to rouse him, to make sure he was all
right.
But still he did not move.
She reached over and put her hand on his bare arm.
His skin was cold.
Too cold.
 She swallowed hard, and then she slowly withdrew her
hand.
She peered through the lattice of sticks, trying to get a
different view of the boy lying on the floor in the cell. She
had to see his face to be sure.
It looks like him…But the hair…Maybe the hair isn’t
right…It’s dark brown, not jet-black like Iska’s had been.
When she finally found an angle where she could see some
of the boy’s face, she realized that it wasn’t him. She
didn’t know who this poor, dead boy had been, but he wasn’t
Iska.
But whoever he had been, he didn’t belong here on the
floor of this cell. There had to be someone out there looking
for him, someone who loved him, someone like Nathaniel or her
mamaw, someone who had been a part of his life, and he a part
of theirs.
She looked down the corridor, her heart so overwhelmed
with emotion that she couldn’t stir herself to move.
The only thing that brought her back was that none of
this made sense. Why are they treating the various prisoners
so differently? Why are they taking care of some but not
others? What are they doing to them? What is the purpose of
all this?
As the questions raced through her mind, she remembered
something from years before. She and Gredic were lying bloody
and beaten on the forest floor on the first night of their
initiation as jaetters.
She realized that the guards weren’t treating some of
the prisoners well and others badly. They were treating them
all badly at first—breaking them down—then slowly feeding
them and taking care of them, making them more and more
dependent and obedient.
They’re initiating them, Willa thought in horror.
They’re adopting these children into the clan and turning
them into jaetters.
 And she knew the reason why. She had seen it all her
life, in the crumbling ceiling of the great hall, in the
echoing corridors and empty dens, in the stories her mamaw
had told her of the many years past. The Dead Hollow clan was
dying. There had been fewer young ones born every year.
When the padaran took her into his rooms behind the
throne, she had seen the fear in the depths of his mind and
the lengths to which he would go to save the clan. He had
adopted the tools and weapons of the humans. He had taken on
their language. He had even started killing the animals of
the forest, something no Faeran of old would ever do. But
even with all the changes he had made, the clan continued to
wither year after year.
She could see now that the padaran had ordered the night-
spirit guards to capture these human children for a purpose.
If children weren’t being born, they’d be stolen, brought
up in the ways of the clan, and grafted into the jaetter life
by force. The padaran would train them just as he had trained
her and Gredic and the others—with food and care, and threat
and violence, all in careful measure, until they were
faithful servants of the clan. There is no I, only we. She
hadn’t had a choice about whether she was part of the Dead
Hollow lair. She hadn’t had a choice about whether she
wanted to be a jaetter. And neither would they.
But looking now at the body of the dead boy lying in the
cell, she knew that some of these children weren’t going to
make it. They were going to die here. The guards would drag
their bodies to the labyrinth and throw them into the black
abyss.
Hopelessness welled up inside her. She looked down the
corridor of cells. How could she ever find Iska in all of
this? How did she know he wasn’t already dead and gone?
Gathering up her strength, she moved down to the next
cell and peered in.
“Iska?” she whispered, but without hope. A little girl
groaned and looked up at her with pleading eyes. Willa felt a
pang in her heart, but she knew she couldn’t help the girl.
There were just too many of them.
Get what you came for, Willa, she told herself again.Get
your take and go.
She pushed herself on to the next cell.
“Iska…” she whispered.
But every hole she looked into offered a new nightmare.
W illa checked cell after cell for Iska, but she could not
find him.
She went down one of the lower side corridors to a place
where the cells were mostly empty. It seemed to be where they
were isolating certain prisoners in an unused part of the
prison.
“Iska, are you here?” she whispered into the darkness.
She didn’t find him in those cells, either.
 She went down another side corridor and kept looking,
using her eyes, her nose, her ears, every sense in her
jaetter body focused on finding him.
Find your take, Willa, she kept thinking.
“Iska…” she whispered into the next cell, trying to
keep her voice from losing hope, but the cell was empty.
“Help me!” came a gasp from farther down the corridor.
Willa ran forward to the cell door and looked into the
hole.
A pair of brown eyes peered out at her, filled with hope.
“Iska!” she said, her heart leaping with joy.
“It’s me,” he said, their fingers touching through the
lattice of sticks.
“I’m so glad I found you,” Willa said.
“I knew you’d come back!” Iska said excitedly.
She could hear the sounds of Nathaniel’s voice in his.
Iska was so much a part of her now. And he was alive! Iska
was actually alive!
She didn’t remember giving him any indication that
she’d come back for him, but it broke her heart to think
that he’d been waiting for her to return all this time.
She pressed her fingers against his through the lattice
of the interwoven sticks, just holding on to them. There was
so much to tell him.
“Do you live in this place?” he asked. “Who are you?
Where do you come from? Do you have food?”
“I’m a friend of your father’s,” she said, ignoring
the rest.
Iska’s face flushed with relief and happiness. “Is he
all right? Where is he? Is he here?”
“No, but he’s been looking for you.”
“I knew he would be,” Iska said, nodding his head.
The boy seemed to have been living on nothing but hope in
his time here, hoping for her to bring him food, hoping for
his father to rescue him. But Willa could hear in Iska’s
tone of voice that he had known it was quite possible that
his father was dead.
“What about my mother?” Iska asked, his voice ragged
with fear. He seemed to already know what Willa was going to
tell him.
“I’m sorry, Iska,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Your mother passed away the night you were captured.”
She had seen the light in Nathaniel’s eyes when he spoke
of Iska’s mother. She had seen the life Ahyoka had lived
with him in their home. She had cared for Ahyoka’s goats and
her bees, and she had sat on Ahyoka’s grave and read her
name.
“Your father buried your mother in the meadow by the
house,” she said sadly.
Iska’s lips pressed together as he slowly nodded his
head and wiped the tears dripping from his eyes. “I saw her
lying on the ground,” he said. “By the river…”
“I’m so sorry, Iska.”
“But who are these creatures?” he asked fiercely,
looking at her through the lattice. “Where are we? What are
they doing with us down here?”
“You’re in the lair of the night-spirits,” she said.
“They’ve been capturing human children.”
“But I don’t understand. What do they want with us?”
“For you to join them,” she said gravely. It didn’t
seem possible, but she knew that was what they were doing.
“Join them?” Iska said in horror.
She was relieved to hear from the revulsion in his voice
that there was still some fighting spirit inside him.
“I’ve come to get you out,” she said. “To take you
back to your father.”
“But I can’t get out of this cell,” Iska said. “I’ve
been trying to dig through the sticks, but it’s
impossible.”
“Step back away from the door,” she said.
 As Iska followed her instructions, Willa put her hands on
the door that separated them. “You’re not going to want to
watch this. Turn your eyes away. Quickly now.”
“What are you going to do?” Iska asked, but in that
instant, the door boiled into a wall of writhing, undead
sticks and collapsed onto the floor into a slimy pile of
twisting black worms.
Iska wrenched away in startled terror. “Oh my god, what
is that?”
“I told you not to watch!” Willa scolded him as she
reached inside, grabbed his arm, and pulled him out of the
cell.
“Come on,” she said, gesturing for him to follow her up
the corridor.
“We need to get my brother and sister,” he said as he
followed her.
“I’m sorry, Iska,” she said, as they quickly turned a
corner. “I haven’t seen them.”
“I know they’re here someplace,” he said. “My sister
wouldn’t give up.”
“But where are they?” she asked.
“Please, Willa,” Iska said. “We can’t leave without
them.”
Willa’s stomach tightened as she looked uncertainly into
the darkened bowels of the rest of the prison. She knew how
difficult it was going to be to find two more prisoners in
the chaos of all these cells and get them out alive. But she
knew that if it was Alliw who was imprisoned here, she could
never leave her behind. It was the bond that could not be
broken.
“All right, we’ll start looking for them,” she said.
“Starting down here in these side tunnels.”
As they ran through the lower tunnels of the prison,
searching from cell to cell, Willa’s legs pumped beneath
her, propelling her forward. Her eyes scanned ahead, looking
for danger at every turn. Iska ran beside her, trying to keep
up, and whispering his sister’s name into the cells.
The corridors of the prison had already been dangerous
for her, but with Iska in tow, they were far more so now. His
skin was alarmingly consistent in color from one moment to
the next, and was sure to give them away.
“You’ve got to run faster!” she whispered back to him
as they raced through the tunnels. “If they catch us, we’re
dead!”
She shouldn’t have even said it.
At that moment, three guards came running down the
corridor, spears in hand.
W illa hurled herself against Iska and pinned him to the wall
with her body, then blended into the brown surface of the
woven-stick wall just as the guards came.
“What are you doing?” Iska whispered.
“Stop wiggling!” she hissed beneath her breath as she
pressed herself against him.
As the guards rushed down the corridor, Willa saw that
the larger of the two was Lorcan, the commander.
 “I’ve been feeding the prisoners in the upper cells
just as you ordered,” the smaller guard said. “But two of
them won’t eat, and there’s one in the lower cells who has
tried repeatedly to escape. It bit one of my guards.”
“Keep culling out the weak ones,” Lorcan told him.
“And the next time the one in the lower cells tries to
escape, drag it out of here and throw it into the abyss. They
need to obey or they die.”
Willa smelled the stench of the guards’ bodies as they
passed. When they had finally gone out of sight, she exhaled
a long breath of relief and uncovered Iska.
“How did you—” he started to ask in amazement, but she
grabbed his hand and pulled him down the corridor in the
opposite direction from the guards. If they were going down
into the lower levels, then she was going up.
“Just trust me, Iska,” Willa said. “Follow me as fast
as you can.”
They ran up through one tunnel after another, turning
corner after corner, up through the main corridor of the
prison, then down the side tunnel and the many turns that
followed, until they finally came to the hole she’d used to
sneak her way into the lair.
“Crawl in there and hide,” she told him.
“What? I can’t,” Iska protested. “We need to find my
brother and sister.”
“Just listen, Iska,” she said. “I’ll go back into the
prison for your brother and sister. I swear I will. But I
can’t have you with me. You’re too conspicuous.”
“Because of that thing you do with your skin,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said. “I can blend, but you
can’t, so I need to go alone.”
“I’ll wait here, but we’ve got to find them,” he
said.
“Listen to me,” she said, grabbing his hands as hard as
she could and looking into his eyes. “If I don’t return, it
means I failed and you need to make it home to your father on
your own. If I don’t come back, you’ve got to get out of
here without me.”
“I understand,” he said, nodding. “Be careful.”
She had put on a good front for Iska’s sake, so that
he’d follow her instructions, but as she ran back up the
corridor toward the prison cells, she felt the bile rising up
in her throat. Her whole body was filling with dread. A
terrible premonition invaded her mind.
You’re not going to survive this, Willa, she thought as
she ran.
She had lived in the vast Dead Hollow lair all her life,
but after the time she’d spent in the forest, she realized
what a truly lifeless place it had become. It had once been
the hidden domain of the forest folk, her people of old,
living in harmony with the trees and animals around them—the
woodwitches sculpting its glorious, green, living walls—but
now it had become a dark and sapless hiding place. She had
always known that her powers didn’t work well in the
unnatural lairs of the day-folk, but this place wasn’t much
better. After years of the padaran, there was nothing left
here but rotting sticks and dead souls, lifeless Faeran
followers who’d given up on the beauty of the world.
You were born here and you’re going to die here. The
words came into her mind as she turned the final corner
toward her fate.
Without her animal allies and the full powers of the
forest, how was she going to find Iska’s brother and sister?
How was she going to fight off the guards? There were no
living trees, no wolves or bears or otters—nothing she could
draw on for strength and no one to ask for help.
You’re not going to make it, she thought as she ran
toward the prison cells.
W illa turned the corner and immediately came upon two guards
near the entrance of the prison. She jerked back, pinned
herself to the wall, and blended.
“That human has been fighting hard,” one guard was
saying to the other as they came out of one of the larger
cells.
“Then don’t go easy on it,” the other said. “The
harsher you are, the faster it will break.”
 Her skin crawled as the guards walked right past her. She
waited for them to go up and out of the prison toward the
main area of the lair before she moved.
At that moment, an idea came into her mind.
The answer had been right here in front of her all this
time, but it had taken the guards to remind her.
The shouts and screams that she’d been hearing, the
pleading eyes peering out at her through the lattices of the
cells…
She had thought there was no one who could help her. But
that was wrong. There was someone who could help her. There
were many who could help her. They all had mothers and
fathers to get home to. They all had brothers and sisters
like Iska. And she was surrounded by them.
There were no animals or trees she could draw on here,
but there was something else. In each of these cells there
wasn’t an “it.” There was a “he” or a “she.” There was
a human being , a living, breathing, thinking soul, with wants
and desires just like her—someone fighting to survive.
She quickly crept over to the closest cell.
“Hey, I’m Willa, what’s your name?” she whispered.
“I didn’t do anything. Why am I here?” the voice asked
angrily.
She couldn’t see the prisoner in the cell, but it
sounded like an older human boy.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t put you in here,” Willa said as
she studied the outside of the door. “But I’m going to get
you out.”
“Who are you?” the boy asked, coming to the lattice and
looking out.
“My name is Willa, and I need your help.”
“I’m Cassius,” the boy said, his voice strong and
determined now, almost hopeful.
The doors of the cells were bound tightly shut from the
outside with knots of vines. Every time she used her power to
reanimate the twisted dead sticks of the lair, it sucked the
energy out of her, so she knew she couldn’t continue with
that. It was a slow process, but she pulled and pried at the
vines with her fingers, hoping to unfasten them.
“You’re green,” a small female voice said behind her.
Willa turned to see a little girl’s pale face peering
out at her through the lattice of sticks on the other side of
the corridor. The little girl looked like she was no more
than seven years old, and Willa could see the streaks of the
tears that had fallen down her cheeks.
“Yes, sometimes I am,” Willa said. “What’s your
name?”
“Beatrice,” the little girl said in her tiny voice.
“I’ll come for you next, Beatrice,” Willa said as she
finally figured out how to unfasten the vines and open the
door to Cassius’s cell.
“We don’t have much time before the guards return,”
she said to Cassius as he came out of the cell. He was about
fourteen years old, and had dark brown skin and short black
hair. “Now listen,” Willa said. “Do you think you’re able
to run?”
“Yeah, I can run,” Cassius said, nodding.
“I want you to take Beatrice,” Willa said as she opened
the little girl’s cell. “Can you do that?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” he said. It sounded like he’d
do just about anything she asked him at that moment.
“All right, good,” Willa said, looking up and down the
corridor for any signs of approaching guards. As Cassius took
Beatrice into his arms, she told him exactly what he needed
to do. “Go up this first corridor a little bit, but take an
immediate left, follow it around the curve, then turn right,
then left, then two more lefts, and then down…” She could
see he was listening intently to everything she said. “If
you encounter any guards, then pull back into the shadows and
hide. If they corner you, then watch out for their spears.
They’re very sharp. When you reach the escape hole, there
will be a boy there named Iska. Tell him Willa sent you.
He’ll show you the way out. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I got it,” Cassius said, holding Beatrice.
“We’re ready.”
“Now go, Cassius, run! And tell Iska to expect more.”
I n the next cell she found an eight-year-old girl, gave her
the instructions, and sent her limping on her way.
One door after another. Cell after cell. Prisoner after
prisoner. She freed them as fast as she could untie their
doors, asking them if they’d seen the two children she was
looking for, and then telling them to run, to hide, and to
help each other get to the hole. “If you see the guards, run
as fast as you can!” she told them.
 That’s twenty-three so far, she thought, as she went to
the next cell. The more she freed, the more she knew the
guards would come. They’d hear the noise. They’d see the
commotion. Every child she freed put her further from her own
freedom.
A little boy with freckled skin, ragged red hair, and a
muddy face touched Willa’s arm as two of the other children
ran up the corridor.
“I’ve seen her!” the boy said. “I saw the Cherokee
girl. She was in the cell across from me when I was down in
the bad part. She kept telling me not to give up.”
“The bad part?” Willa said. “Where is that?”
The red-headed boy pointed farther down the corridor.
“There’s a tunnel off to the side that goes to the right,
through an area where there’s been a cave-in, and then
curves way down deep. It’s the third door.”
“Thank you,” Willa said. “Now run.”
As the boy made his escape, Willa ran in the opposite
direction, down into what he had called the bad part of the
prison.
The rotting ceiling sagged so low that she had to duck
beneath it to get through. Other areas she had to climb.
Black mold coated the woven-stick walls. A dank, unbearable
stench filled her nostrils. Finally, she came to the third
door and peered into the darkness.
Willa saw the arms and legs first, all folded up in the
corner of the cell. The hands, the thighs, the whole body was
wrapped around something.
The brown skin of the arms and legs was dirty, scraped,
and bruised. The long black hair was matted, hanging all
around the arms and legs and the thing inside.
And then the eyes opened and looked at her, brown in
color, and staring warily back at her.
She’s alive, Willa thought in relief.
The girl’s arms and legs pulled inward, wrapping more
tightly around the small boy she was protecting in the bend
of her body.
“Whatever you are, stay away from us,” the girl said,
her voice laced with intense fear as she jerked deeper into
her cell. “Get away from us!”
Willa pulled back, startled.
Crammed down in this darkened cell, this girl had been
through too much.
Willa slowly crouched to the floor, lowering herself so
she looked less threatening, and spoke in her softest voice.
“My name is Willa,” she said. “I’m a friend of Iska
and your father, and I’m here to help you, Hialeah. If
you’ll let me, I’m going to get you and Inali out of this
cell.”
Hialeah stared back at her in shock. It appeared to be
the first time anyone had said her name in weeks.
“How do you know my name?” she asked.
I saw it written on your grave, Willa thought, but she
did not say it. “I know your father,” she said. “He told
me all about you and your brothers.”
“You’re going to get us out?” she asked in amazement,
her voice filled with disbelief and uncertainty. “Is this a
trick?”
Willa slowly opened the cell door.
“Don’t come any closer!” Hialeah shouted at her,
holding her crying brother tight to her body.
“I’m not coming in,” Willa said, moving back away from
the door. “The choice is yours…” she said, speaking so
softly now that she knew the girl could barely hear her.
“Iska’s waiting for us, Hialeah. But we don’t have much
time. We have one chance to get out. And that chance is now.
But we’ve got to run. We’ve got to fight. I’m not certain
we’ll succeed. If they catch us, they’re going to kill us.
But we have this one chance, to either cower down here in
this cell, or to run for home. Which do you want to do,
Hialeah?”
 Hialeah stared at her, still holding her brother. “I
want to run,” she said.
When Willa extended her hand, Hialeah took it. She pulled
the girl and her brother out of the cramped confines of the
cell. As Hialeah rose to her feet, Willa saw she was
surprisingly tall, with a long, lean body, and arms and legs
to match. She had long, straight black hair that fell down to
her waist, and her face was filled with stern determination.
Her little brother, Inali, clung to her chest, looking around
with bewildered eyes, but he’d stopped crying. It seemed as
if Hialeah had been holding and protecting her little brother
for weeks. It was the bond that could not be broken.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Willa said, leading them up the
corridor.
When Willa began to run, Hialeah ran with her. The girl
had been resistant to trust her at first, but now that she
understood what they needed to do, she was moving quickly.
When Willa ran faster, Hialeah stayed right with her. The
girl’s legs were strong, and pumped hard. She and Willa ran
side by side, both of them scanning ahead and looking behind
them, ready for the worst.
“Just hold on, Inali, I’ve got you,” Hialeah whispered
to her brother as they ran. “We’re getting out.”
When they came to an obstruction in their path where part
of the old tunnel had caved in and blocked their way, Willa
climbed up on top of it and then reached down. Hialeah handed
Inali up to her, climbed up herself, then took her brother
back into her arms on the other side.
As they ran through the corridors past the other prison
cells, Willa could see that they were all empty. She had
freed every last prisoner she could find.
She, Hialeah, and Inali ran down winding tunnel after
winding tunnel.
“It’s not much farther,” Willa told them.
As they turned the final corner, Willa saw the last of
the escaping children at the end of the corridor. They were
getting down onto their hands and knees and crawling
frantically into the hole. Only one small face remained
peering out.
“Iska!” Hialeah cried out with relief.
Willa’s heart swelled with hope. They were going to make
it! They were all going to make it!
But then a rushing sound rose up behind them, the
pounding of many feet and the clatter of weapons.
“Run!” Willa screamed at Hialeah, then turned to stand
her ground against the coming guards.
The first guard charged toward her and thrust his spear.
Willa leapt back just in time. But another guard attacked
from the other side. There was a swarm of at least a dozen of
them.
“It’s the jaetter!” Lorcan shouted, looming above the
other night-spirit guards as he pushed through them to reach
her. “It’s Willa! Get her!”
Two of the guards charged in, stabbing frantically. Willa
dodged and dodged again. She glanced back behind her to see
Hialeah running for the hole with her brother in her arms.
A guard lunged forward and grabbed at Willa, but Willa
leapt out of his grasp. Lorcan jabbed in with his spear.
Willa tried to leap to the side, but the sharp tip grazed her
leg and sliced through her skin with a painful, ripping tear.
That’s when Willa realized that Lorcan’s spear wasn’t
just a wooden stick like it had been before. The tip had been
equipped with one of the flint arrowheads that she herself
had provided to the clan, so sharp that it could easily slice
through muscle and bone.
One of the other guards thrust his spear and stabbed her
in the arm. Bolts of pain radiated through her shoulder and
hand, driving a scream from her lungs. She tried to dodge the
next stab. She tried to fight them all. But it was no use.
She couldn’t hold them off any longer. She turned and fled
for the hole.
 She could feel herself getting farther away from them
with every step she took. Her heart swelled with hope that
she was going to make it. But as she ran away, Lorcan pulled
back his arm and hurled his killing spear like a javelin. It
shot through the air and struck her in the neck with a
shocking blow and knocked her to the floor.
She looked down toward the end of the corridor, and the
last thing she saw was Nathaniel’s children disappearing
into the escape hole.
H er body lay facedown, flat across the floor. Searing pain
throbbed from the wound where the spear had cut through the
flesh of her neck. She couldn’t lift her head to see the
guards charging down the tunnel toward her, but she knew they
were coming. She could hear their shouting. She could feel
the pounding of their footsteps in the vibrations of the
floor. She had seconds to live. And after stabbing her in the
heart with their spears, the guards were going to grab Iska,
Hialeah, and Inali as they tried to crawl to their escape.
Somehow, some way, she had to stop the guards. Nothing
else mattered to her.
She closed her eyes, pressed her hands to the woven-stick
floor, and conjured up the darkest woodcraft she had ever
used. She had grown up asking the tendrils of the plants
around her for their gentle assistance, and she had learned
how to move the living trees with the force of her will. But
this was different. To bring these old sticks back—to waken
the dead—she had to infuse them with her own blood, her own
life. She had to let the vile black twigs absorb the
nutrients of her soul. It had weakened her every time she did
it, dragging the life from her body. But she had no choice.
She pressed her bloody neck wound against the floor, infusing
it with the last of her living power. She could feel it
sucking the life from her blood so rapidly that she flooded
with cold. As the guards rushed forward to grab her, the
floor beneath them erupted into a slime of black and twisting
undead sticks.
The first guard screamed in horror as he fell through the
wormy floor. The writhing, grasping sticks sucked the life
from his withering body as he plummeted into them. She gasped
in astonishment when the wave of his energy coursed back
through the floor around her. And then something jolted up
into her body, filling her with a surge of strength she’d
never felt before. For just a moment, the floor had become
the roots, and she the tree. The remaining guards recoiled in
shock and fear.
“She’s a woodwitch!” one of them screamed, as they all
backed away and fled.
Gasping for breath, she climbed up onto her feet, her
arms and legs shaking, not just from exhaustion but from the
pulsating force that had wicked up into her body. She pressed
her trembling hand to the bleeding wound at her neck as she
stumbled toward the hole in the wall.
 All the other children had crawled through the hole and
escaped the lair. Only Iska, Hialeah, and Inali remained.
They were waiting for her. When they saw her coming, they
rushed forward to help her.
“Your wound is bad,” Hialeah said, quickly tearing
pieces of fabric from her dress and beginning to work on
Willa’s neck. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
“I gave us a few seconds, but Lorcan and the other
guards will go around to the other side and find another way
through,” Willa gasped. “You need to crawl through that
hole and don’t come back.”
“But, Willa—” Iska tried to interrupt her, but Willa
kept talking.
“On the other side of this hole, you need to run as fast
and as far as you can. Climb the ridge, and then head west
through the forest until you reach the creek.”
It hurt to talk. It hurt to move. Her neck throbbed. She
could see that blood was all over Hialeah’s hands as she
worked on the bandage—but unlike Iska, who was just shaking
his head in refusal, Hialeah was listening intently to every
word she said.
“When they realize what’s happened, the night-spirits
are going to send out search parties looking for you,” she
told Hialeah. “They can see far better than you can in the
darkness, so don’t travel at night. Follow the creek
downstream, and look for a very small cave in the rocks.
Crawl inside and get down into the water to hide your scent.
Stay quiet and hidden until morning. When the sun rises, many
of the night-spirit guards will return to the lair. That will
be your chance. Follow the creek the rest of the way
downstream until it joins up with the river, and then follow
the river all the way home. The journey will be difficult,
Hialeah. Many hours and many miles. But you can do this. Get
your brothers home to your father. That’s what you need to
do. Do you understand?”
 “I understand,” Hialeah said, looking at Willa with
steady eyes as she tied off the last of the bandage. “I’ll
do it.”
“No!” Iska said, grabbing both of them. “You’ve got
to come with us, Willa!”
“She’s not coming,” Hialeah said, her voice grim and
steady.
“I’m sorry, Iska, she’s right,” Willa said. “I’m
not going with you, and you’ll not see me again after this.
I’m going to stay here. I’ll close this hole behind you and
lead the guards away so they won’t know where you and the
others have gone. Now that they’ve seen me, they’re going
to be looking for me. The one who kills or captures me will
gain great pride in the clan. In the meantime, if you and the
others can get far enough away, then you’ll have a chance.”
“You can’t give yourself up,” Iska said, shaking his
head.
“You’re not listening,” Hialeah said. “She’s made
her decision. She doesn’t want you with her.”
“I only need one more thing,” Willa said, looking at
the two of them. “Your father taught me some of the letters
of the Eng-lish words, but we weren’t able to finish.”
“Tell me what you need,” Hialeah said.
“While I was at your house, I learned how to spell my
mother’s name, but not my father’s. How do you spell
‘Cillian’?”
As Hialeah quickly spelled out the letters for her, Iska
tried to keep arguing. “Willa, no, don’t give up on us.
Forget about all this. Come with us.” But even as Iska said
the words, Willa’s mind focused on the sounds of her
father’s name, and she heard the echoes of the distant past,
of the forward and the back, the left and the right, and the
River of Souls. She turned back to Iska knowing more than
ever what she had to do. “No matter what else happens,
Iska,” she said, “the most important thing to me is that
the three of you get back to your father. He loves you and he
needs you. Do you understand? You must get home.”
“But what are you going to do?” Iska cried. “You
can’t fight them all alone!”
“I’m not going to fight them,” she said. “And I’m
not alone.”
T he last she saw of Iska, Hialeah, and little Inali, they
were crawling through the hole and escaping into the
darkness.
The moment they were gone, she pried and twisted the
sticks at the edge of the hole with her fingers, pushing and
pulling them, weaving one stick into the other, her bloody
fingers dancing across the old rotting bark until the sticks
began to move on their own, sucking the life force from her
skin and her bones, intertwining like black, slithering
snakes until the hole was closed and the snakes went still.
As she lay crumpled against the wall, trying to keep
herself steady, she imagined Iska and Hialeah escaping from
the lair with their little brother, running through the
forest with the other children. Keep running, she told them
in her mind. Keep running.
A roar of sound came rushing down the tunnel from the
upper part of the lair. Pounding feet and pumping legs,
laboring breaths and shouting voices, clattering spears and
chattering teeth, and a thousand other sounds, all crashing
toward her.
Holding the blood-soaked bandage to her neck, and knowing
what she must do, she slowly rose to her feet to meet them.
Her eyes glazed as she waited for them.
She could see it in her mind. She could see it all. The
long withering of the Faeran race and the rise of the
padaran, god of the Dead Hollow clan. The steel traps, the
captured children, and the glistening face. The words of
guiding wisdom, the towering strength, and the missing
voices. The running parents, the screaming sister, and the
red flowing stream beneath the lair. She could see it all.
But even through the winter of all of this, there had
still been a trace of hope in her mamaw’s voice when she
taught her the lessons of old, and there had been a glare of
anger in Gillen’s eyes when she saw the injustices in the
padaran’s hall—and these were the saplings that might
someday grow into the light once more.
When twenty guards came charging down the corridor, she
couldn’t help but suck in a startled breath. She wanted to
run, to blend, to hide, but she stiffened her legs the best
she could and made her stand.
In her mind and her spirit, she detached herself from the
world, like a branch broken from a tree, from the sound, from
the fear, from the pain that she knew was to come.
 Lorcan charged forward and slammed the butt of his spear
into her face with a battering blow that knocked her to the
ground.
She lay flat out, facedown on the floor, spasms of
excruciating pain radiating through her head and neck.
She lay there on the floor very still.
She closed her eyes.
She slowed her heart.
She stanched the bleeding of her wounds.
And she stopped breathing.
“Is she dead?” one of the guards asked, jabbing at her
limp body with his spear.
Lorcan crouched to the floor and clamped onto her neck
with his hand to hold her securely in place as he leaned down
and listened for her heart.
He listened for ten seconds.
And then thirty seconds.
And then he rose back up to his feet.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“T ie the body’s hands,” Lorcan ordered bluntly.
Two of the guards immediately knelt down and bound her
wrists with vine.
“Now drag it,” Lorcan said.
As they dragged her down the corridor, Willa let her body
fall limp and her head hang low with her hair covering her
face.
 As they pulled her along the floor, she took a quiet,
unnoticed breath and slowly released a few beats of her
heart, pumping just enough blood through her body to stay
alive.
She knew where Lorcan and the other guards were taking
her.
Time was all she needed now. Time for children to run.
Time for children to hide. Time for children to escape out
into the world and return to the arms of their mothers and
fathers where they belonged.
She heard the hisses first, then the snarls and the
jeers, and she felt the air change as the guards pulled her
into the Hall of the Padaran, which was already crowded with
hundreds of the Dead Hollow clan.
The other Faeran spat at her and shouted at her, enraged
with her treason against the lair.
Her fellow jaetters were worst of all, snapping and
biting at her as the guards dragged her through the clamoring
crowd, her legs scraping along the floor.
“Traitor!” Kearnin and Ciderg shouted as they leapt
forward and struck her limp form, sending bolts of pain
through her body.
As she glanced through the narrow slit of her eyes, out
through the tangled fall of her hair, she saw Gredic
watching, too stunned to speak or move, as they dragged her
dead body past him. She could see her old friend Gillen, too,
her face filled with despair. And many of the Faeran in the
crowd stood in aghast silence at the sight of a dead girl
being brought before them.
Finally, Lorcan grabbed hold of her and threw her body
brutally onto the floor at the padaran’s feet.
The slamming pain reverberated through her bones, but she
did not cry out, and she did not move.
“The woodwitch is dead!” he declared. “May the wisdom
of the padaran always guide us.”
 The padaran sat on his throne staring down at her body
with grim satisfaction, his shoulders hunched and his quills
raised all around his neck and head, making him seem even
more massive than he was. There was a bandage wrapped around
his right foot, but the skin of his face and arms glistened
with the bronze, sparkling colors of his divine power, and
his eyes blazed with certainty.
As she lay there on the floor, Willa thought that she had
been here before. She had been dragged. She had been kicked.
She had been hissed at and attacked. But she knew that this
would be the last time she would ever be hauled before the
padaran. This would be the last time she would ever see the
ancient Hall of the Glittering Birds.
Through all the strikes and all the pain, Willa had
pulled herself inward. She had not fought back. She had not
cried out. She had taken the punches and the kicks, the bites
and the spits. She had taken it all. She knew that death was
near. But when it came, it was going to be in her own way.
All she needed was time.
She lay wounded, tied, and beaten on the floor in front
of the padaran, but she did not feel defeated. She had given
Nathaniel’s children a hole to crawl through and the time
they needed. She imagined Hialeah leading her two brothers
through the forest. She could see them climbing through the
rocks of the creek. They were going to make it home.
“Nothing has any meaning anymore,” Nathaniel had said
to her, but now it would. She had saved his children. She had
saved Nathaniel.
She slowly released the muscle of her heart, and let it
start beating again. She felt the blood beginning to pump
fast and strong through her veins. She began to take air into
her lungs, in deep, steady breaths.
As she lay on the floor, she slowly lifted her eyes and
looked around her at the padaran and the jaetters and all the
members of the clan.
It was finally time to do what she had come to do.
L ying crumpled on the floor of the great hall, with her hands
still bound at the wrists, Willa slowly raised her head and
began to gather herself together.
Gasps of shock and confusion erupted from the crowd as
they saw her moving.
“She’s alive!” Gillen yelled, rushing through the
other jaetters to try to help her, but the massive Ciderg
grabbed Gillen and shoved her back.
 “Willa is moving!” someone in the crowd yelled.
“But she was dead!” shouted one of the guards who had
seen Lorcan strike her down. “Her heart was stopped!”
Everyone watched in disbelief as Willa, with her hands
still tied, leveraged herself onto her shoulder, got her legs
beneath her, and slowly rose to her feet.
A wave of murmurs and fear ran through the crowd.
She stood a few feet in front of the throne and looked
squarely at the padaran.
The padaran stared back at her, his lip curling with
malevolence. Unlike many of the others in the great hall, he
didn’t appear frightened that she had risen from the dead.
He seemed to be thinking through the best way to kill her in
front of all the members of the clan, to make her an example
of what happened to those who raised their voices against
him. But he showed no signs of fear that she possessed some
unnatural power that might actually be a danger to him. And
it was at that moment that she knew for sure that her hunch
about him was right.
It’s all a trick, she thought,a disguise, a blend. It
always has been.
The padaran rose from his throne and stood to his full
height in front of her and the onlooking crowd, the majesty
of his glimmering quills raised around his head, and his
steel spear of power gripped in his hand.
“You dare to stand in front of me?” he snarled.
“I stand in front of whoever I choose,” she replied.
“You’re a traitor to the clan!” he roared, raising his
spear at her.
Willa tried to stand tall, but Lorcan struck the back of
her legs with the shaft of his spear and sent her crashing
painfully to her knees. “Kneel before your padaran, you
vermin!”
“She’s a traitor!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“She attacked the padaran with the steel traps of the
humans!” one of the jaetters hissed.
 “And she released the prisoners!” a guard shouted.
“They’ve all escaped!”
“Traitor!” people started screaming all around.
“String her up!” Ciderg bellowed, raising his muscled
arm.
Willa scrambled back up onto her feet as a wall of
enraged, mottled-gray faces and tightening fists came toward
her. Gredic and his pack of gnashing, hissing jaetters
surrounded her with the rest of the attackers. Gillen and a
few others pushed toward her and struggled to help her, but
they were powerless against the mass of bodies.
The mob of people surrounded her, grabbing her on all
sides. She felt hundreds of clawed fingers gripping her arms,
her legs, her hair, her neck. Her skin crawled and twitched
as their hands and bodies pressed against her. She tried
frantically to escape, to wrest herself away from them, but
they were all around her, drowning her in their grasping
hands.
She felt as if she was moments from death, but then a
thought poured into her mind.
The River of Souls.
She could see it, and she could hear her mamaw’s voice
in her mind.
You are forever among your people, her mamaw had told
her. The past, the present, and the future to come.
Doing everything she could to steady her fear, she
stopped struggling or trying to get away from the mob of
Faeran around her. She looked into the grimacing faces of
those trying to hurt her. And she looked into Gillen’s eyes
as the girl fought to protect her. She looked at them all.
Believe, Willa told herself.Believe in your people.
Pulling in a deep breath, she stood in the middle of the
thronging crowd, stretched her bound wrists above her head,
and screamed in the old language, “I want you all to stop
right now!”
 The startling sound of the Faeran words echoed across the
hall, up into the decaying wings of the ancient sculpted
birds that adorned the ceiling.
Gasps rippled through the crowd: the little woodwitch had
dared to speak the old language in the Hall of the Padaran!
“Just stop!” she screamed again, this time in both the
Faeran words and the Eng-lish, so that all of the people
could understand her. “Just stand still and listen to me!”
The crowd watched in awe as the vines binding her wrists
began to move of their own accord, twisting and twining with
life until they unfurled from her hands, and fell away to the
floor.
Lorcan charged forward to slam her with the shaft of his
spear like he had before, but she caught the shaft of the
weapon in her hand and instantly melted it into a writhing
wooden snake and threw it to the ground.
The crowd shouted in dismay and shrunk back in fear.
“Listen to me,” she said as she looked out across the
many faces. “You know my name is Willa, and I’ve been a
loyal member of this clan all my life. I just need you to
listen to what I have to say…”
“Listen to her!” Gillen shouted.
“She’s a traitor!” one of the jaetters hissed.
“Let the little one speak!” yelled one of the other
Faeran in the crowd.
“I did not come here to die,” Willa said. “And I did
not come here to fight you or harm you…”
As she continued speaking, she felt many of the people in
the crowd moving closer, trying to hear her. They were
pressing in on her, but it had a different feeling now. They
were listening, touching her with their hands, crowding
around her.
“I came to the great hall this night to speak to all of
you about Naillic.”
It was as if she had thrust a stick into a hornet’s
nest. A buzz of whispers and agitation whirred through the
crowd. Suddenly the movements in the room began to shift. She
felt new forces driving toward her, others pulling away.
“I’ve heard the word before,” someone said.
“What does it mean?” asked another.
“It’s forbidden!” one of the jaetters whispered.
“Don’t say it!” another hissed.
“Death will come!” one of the older Faeran shouted.
“Don’t say the word!” someone warned.
“But it’s not just a word,” Willa said. “Naillic is a
name, the name of a Faeran boy who was born in this clan.”
“Seize her!” the padaran screamed from the dais of his
throne.
Lorcan and the other guards shoved forward to follow his
orders, but it was too late. The crowd had engulfed her in a
river of Faeran bodies, a River of Souls.
Willa pointed toward the padaran standing by the throne.
“Those who knew the truth have been killed. Those who raised
their voices have been silenced. The memory of the past has
been pushed from our minds. But I came here to tell you that
his name is Naillic. He is not an all-powerful, glistening
god. He’s a normal, mortal Faeran just like the rest of
us!”
“Don’t let her speak another word!” the padaran
screamed at his guards. “Kill her!”
The guards pushed into the mass of people, shoving with
their arms and stabbing with their spears, forcing their way
toward her, but shouts of terror and anger rose up from the
crowd. Gredic and many of the jaetters attacked, biting and
clawing their way toward her.
The mob of people around her rose up into a swarm, like
bees around a developing queen of a new hive, pressing in on
her, protecting her.
“He claims to be the great leader of the clan,” she
shouted above the rising clamor of the crowd. “He says that
we must always stick together, that we must always care for
one another, but has he cared for the ones we love?”
 “She’s a traitor!” Ciderg spat as he tried to fight
his way through the crowd to get to her.
“She speaks the truth!” one of the elders called.
“Don’t trust her,” someone shouted.
“She’s a woodwitch!” somebody else screamed.
“Trust in the padaran!”
“Let her speak!” Gillen shouted out. “Listen to her!”
“Kill her!”
Feeling the rise of the clan all around her, Willa turned
toward the padaran and pointed at him. “We all know that all
Faeran are born with a twin to whom we are bound and
connected for the rest of our lives—the left hand and the
right, the forward and the back. But where is your brother,
Naillic? Where is Cillian? Where is the man who was my
father?”
S he had finally said the words she had come to say. And when
she said them, all of the Faeran in the great hall stared up
at the padaran in utter shock, slowly coming to realize the
full meaning of her accusation. Hushed murmurs of confusion
and uncertainty ran through the crowd.
“She’s a traitor, kill her!” the padaran ordered his
guards again, pointing his long, crooked finger at her, but
hundreds of Faeran surrounded her, blocking the guards.
 Climbing up onto the base of one of the great hall’s
old, rotted sculptures, Willa shouted at the padaran across
the heads of the crowd.
“My father was another traitor, just like me, wasn’t
he, Uncle!” she yelled. “He kept clinging to the old ways,
like so many of our loved ones who have gone missing.” She
knew that many in the clan had lost people dear to them—
those who had spoken up, who had resisted, who had put the
love for their family before their obedience to the padaran.
She wasn’t sure anyone was listening to her, but then a
voice called out to the padaran from the crowd. “Tell us
what happened to Cillian!”
And then many of the Faeran started pushing toward the
throne, anxious to understand. “Tell us!”
“What happened to Nea and little Alliw?” someone else
cried out from the back.
Willa’s heart swelled when she heard her mother’s and
sister’s name. Someone must have remembered her family from
years before, but they’d been too frightened to raise their
voices until now. Knowing brings death.
“All my life, you told me that the humans killed my
parents,” she shouted at the padaran. “But I suspect that
the truth is that my mother and father committed a crime in
your eyes, the crime of raising their daughters in their own
way, speaking the Faeran language with them, and teaching
them the lore of our people. And worst of all, my father knew
your name, knew who you truly were, Naillic. He was a
constant reminder that you were not the padaran, you were not
a god.”
As she spoke, the Faeran looked upon the padaran, and
they looked upon her, and they whispered and discussed among
themselves, trying to put the truth together.
“You call me a traitor to the clan for what I’ve said
and what I’ve done,” Willa shouted at the padaran and the
guards surrounding him. “And you say I’m a traitor because
I freed the humans from the prisons below. But I have never
stabbed a Faeran with a spear, never punched one with a fist.
I live in the old ways, where the members of a clan take care
of each other and love each other.”
Willa gazed across the faces of the crowd, all of them
turned toward her now. “The padaran not only murders his own
people, he traps and slaughters the animals of the forest who
were once our friends and allies! He has abandoned the ways
of the forest that keep us alive! He sends out his guards to
kill innocent day-folk and capture their children! He poisons
our ears with lies about the humans even as he hoards their
machines in his private dens, trying to make sense of what
they do!”
“If we don’t adapt, we’re all going to die!” the
padaran bellowed, trying to intimidate them with the force of
his will, but turmoil swirled through the crowd, like
hundreds of bees buzzing in a corrupted hive.
She turned back to the padaran. “I ask you once again,
Naillic. Tell us all. Where is your brother? Where is
Cillian?”
“Stop saying that traitor’s name!” the padaran spat,
seething with venomous anger. His whole body seemed to glow
with scintillating power as he pointed his spear toward her.
“You killed your own brother!” someone screamed. There
was no greater loss to a Faeran than losing a twin brother or
sister. And there was no more heinous crime among the Faeran
people than killing your own twin. It was the bond that could
not be broken, and Naillic had broken it. The entire crowd
erupted with rage.
“He’s a twin-killer!” someone yelled in the old
language, and it brought a burst of joy to Willa’s heart.
She had thought she would never hear the language again, but
now they were actually shouting it. The clan was rising up
against the padaran!
“Where is my mother?” someone cried out.
“You killed my sister!” screamed another.
 “What have you done, Naillic?” yelled a voice from the
back.
“All the traitors of the clan must be killed!” the
padaran shouted back at them, gripping his spear of power as
if he was going to hurl it into the crowd. They shrank back
in fear, but they did not flee.
“All of you,” Willa shouted out to the Faeran people as
she pointed at the padaran. “I want you to look now at
Naillic with your own eyes. Can you see him? Can you truly
see him? He’s not a shimmering god. He’s been tricking us
all. He’s blending ! He’s a woodwitch. He comes from a
powerful family of woodwitches. He comes from my family! Even
as he vilified the Faeran of old who built this glorious
hall, even as he took this sacred place in his own name, he
used his own Faeran powers to deceive us. He’s disguising
himself to look like everything we want our leader to be.
It’s all a lie!”
As everyone in the crowd gazed at the padaran in
amazement, the glistening of his face and body seemed to
fade.
“I see it!” someone gasped. Many of the Faeran
maneuvered to get a closer look. Others pointed and
whispered, their faces filled with suspicion and surprise.
The luster of the padaran’s aura dimmed. The wrinkled,
gray skin of his massive, old body started to become more
visible.
“I see it, too! He’s been tricking us!” someone called
out.
“The Faeran people of the past used their woodland
powers to conceal themselves from our enemies,” Willa
shouted. “Naillic is the first woodwitch to use his powers
to conceal himself from his own people, to trick the eyes of
all the Faeran who see him.”
With the help of Gillen and several of the other Faeran
around her, Willa quickly climbed down from the base of the
old sculpture and moved through the mass of people toward the
passageway that led into the padaran’s private chambers.
“Stop her!” the padaran commanded, waving his hands
frantically at Lorcan and the other guards.
“We have to help her!” Gillen cried, rallying the
Faeran around her. “We have to protect Willa!”
“Everyone come with me!” Willa shouted above the
commotion. “Come see what the great padaran has hoarded in
his dens!”
“No one gets through!” the padaran ordered his guards
as he hurried to block the passageway.
“Follow me!” Willa shouted again, raising her arm above
her head, and suddenly the mass of the crowd rushed the dais
of the throne.
“I command you to stop!” the padaran roared.
But the people did not stop. They poured around him like
water around a stone. His skin was entirely gray now, his
body dripping with sweat, and his face mangled from years of
deception. The padaran lunged forward with his spear and
stabbed one of the oncoming Faeran in the chest, sending him
dead to the ground, then he lunged again and stabbed another.
Lorcan grabbed a spear from one of the other guards and
charged into battle. He thrust his spear into one rioter
after another, sending them staggering back with bloody
wounds. But then five of the rioters surrounded him and
struck him down, wrenched the spear from his hands, and drove
it into his heart. Lorcan, the commander of the padaran’s
guard, was finally dead.
The padaran grabbed a torch from the wall and blocked the
entrance to his den.
“Stay back!” he screamed at the encroaching mob as he
brandished the burning torch from side to side. “I will burn
anyone who comes near!”
Leading a pack of jaetters, Gredic and Ciderg barreled
into the rioters to take back the area around the throne and
protect the padaran. Ciderg grabbed one of them by the head,
and hurled him aside. A whole new wave of attacking guards
and jaetters pushed into the crowd with their spears. But
then the swarm of the angry mob fell upon Ciderg in force,
striking him with many blows.
“No!” Gredic screamed, trying to save his brother, but
it was too late. Ciderg’s body toppled to the floor with a
crash.
A new storm of confusion and violence erupted all around
as jaetters and guards fought against the surging crowd.
“Stay out!” the padaran screamed as he grabbed two more
torches and propped them up in the passageway to create a
barrier of flame. The torches popped and smoked, and the
flame burned high as he added more and more torches to the
barricade.
In the midst of the chaos, a group of three hissing
jaetters shoved their way through the mob. One clawed Gillen
across the face. The other two knocked Willa to the ground.
The teeth of the attacking jaetters chattered with
anticipation as they came at her.
The flames of the padaran’s torches burned upward,
joining together and scorching the walls.
“If you try to get in here, you’re all going to burn!”
the padaran shouted at the rioters as he retreated into his
private dens.
One of the torches fell and hit the woven-stick floor,
catching it aflame.
As the fire spread across the floor and walls, the great
Hall of the Padaran began to fill with smoke, and screams of
terror rose up from the chaos of the crowd.
W illa found herself engulfed in a wave of running, screaming
people and burning flames. A foot hit her in the head.
Another foot stepped on her back. She tried to get up, but
the running crowd trampled over her.
Crushed to the floor, she looked over to see Gillen
fighting to get closer.
“Gillen!” Willa cried as she reached for her. For a
moment, their fingers touched and they were almost able to
grasp each other’s hand, but then the mob swept Gillen away
like the current of a great river and she was gone.
Filled with new determination, Willa growled and tried to
get up, only to be knocked down again.
Finally, someone in the crowd stopped to help her. He
held her arm and pulled her up onto her feet. She could
finally breathe. She got her legs underneath her and was able
to stand. Someone was saving her life. She turned with hope
in her heart, but then saw Gredic’s face and felt his hands
clamp painfully onto her arms.
“You’re coming with me, Willa,” he snarled as he
dragged her through the fleeing crowd.
Willa tried to yank away, but it made no difference. He
held on to her tighter than he had ever held her before, as
if he knew this was his last chance. He wasn’t going to let
her go.
The fear boiling up inside her, she fought and flailed
against him, but he was far too strong. He dragged her out of
the burning Hall of the Padaran and down one of the smoky
side corridors.
Angry at her resistance, Gredic slammed her up against a
wall and pinned her with the force of his body.
“Stop it, Willa!” Gredic shouted into her face.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. He pushed
against her so hard that it was like a rock had fallen
against her.
“The lair is going to burn,” he said, his tone ragged
with fear. “Do you understand me? It’s all going to burn!
But you and I are going to stop fighting each other.”
Willa could see what was happening. He’d lost his twin
brother and his jaetter allies and now he was alone, which
terrified him more than anything he had ever faced. His
instinct now was to clan together, even with someone he
hated. “We’re going to escape. We’re together now,
Willa.”
 She could see the violence in Gredic’s eyes, the need to
control, to dominate, but more than anything, she could hear
the desperation in his voice. She tried to jerk away from
him, but he held her firm, pressed against the wall.
“We’re together now, Willa,” he said again, as if he
could force the thought into her mind.
She knew there was no way out of this. He was never going
to let her go. And even if she managed to escape him, he’d
follow her. He was going to hunt her down.
She needed a different way, a different path.
She could only see one way out.
Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do,
things that went against everything you had ever done before.
She stopped fighting him.
She became very still and she looked into his bloodshot
eyes.
“All right,” she said, nodding her head in agreement.
“We’ll leave together, through the labyrinth to my old den.
I know a way out of there.”
Gredic grunted, pleased that she was finally beginning to
cooperate with him, but he clutched her arm, wary of a trick,
and shoved her along in front of him like one of the human
prisoners.
She tried to wrest her arm away from him, but he
wouldn’t let her go. He pushed her and dragged her down
through the tunnels of the lair, leaving the smoke and flames
and shouting behind them.
“The whole lair is burning up there,” she said in
dismay.
“We’re going to make it on our own,” Gredic said.
“We’re together now,” he repeated with a clinging
insistence that sent a cringe down her spine.
When they finally reached the labyrinth, she guided him
down through the stone tunnels that led toward her den.
When he realized she was leading them in the right
direction, she felt his grip on her arm relax a little. She
stumbled and collapsed to the floor. Gredic reflexively
reached down to pull her to her feet. She leapt up and sprang
away from him with all her speed. But he reached out just as
quick, grabbed her by the hair, yanked her back, and pulled
her off her feet. She screamed in pain as she fell backward
and hit the floor, banging her head hard.
“You’re not going to escape, Willa!” Gredic rasped as
he pinned her to the ground with his hand gripping her neck.
Her refusal of his offer, her rejection of him, had filled
him with rage. “You’re going to regret the choice you’ve
made trying to get away from me again. I can see now the
nasty little lying beast that you really are. But you’re not
as smart as you think you are. After I’m done with you here,
I’m going to track down those three little humans of yours
that you seem to care so much about. You forget how long
we’ve been together, Willa. I know exactly where you hid
them. And after I’m done with you here, I’m going to track
them down and make sure they never get home.”
Willa exploded with anger and squirmed from his grip,
twisting her body and knocking his clutching hands away.
She leapt up and darted out of his reach, then sprinted
down the corridor.
She followed the winding passageway, but she could hear
his footsteps coming behind her. There was no way to outrun
him for long, and he was too close for her to blend into the
rock wall.
She turned down the tunnel on the left, then turned to
the right. Gredic followed right behind her, growling with
anger.
When she came to the end of the long, winding tunnel and
took the passageway on the left, she did it knowingly. But
when she felt the air turning cold, her chest seized with
panic despite herself. It was a choice she could not come
back from.
The blackness of the abyss was just steps away.
 She came to the edge of the dark hole at the end of the
tunnel, and there was nowhere else to go.
She was trapped.
The hole of the abyss fell hundreds of feet down into
pitch-darkness. No one knew how deep it was, or if it even
had a bottom.
Gredic lunged forward and clutched her with his bony
hands.
He had grabbed her so many times over the years. She had
fought him for so long. But this time, she didn’t try to
leap away. She didn’t try to dodge him or fight him. As he
charged forward, she pulled him into her, wrapped her arms
around him, and held on.
I’m going to track them down and make sure they never
get home, Gredic had said. And that was his mistake.
She leaned way back.
“We’re together now, Gredic,” she whispered into his
ear.
In a flailing spasm of wild panic, Gredic tried to escape
her embracing arms.
But it was too late.
The two of them fell together.
W illa fell through the black darkness of the abyss. Her mind
screamed with fear that these were the last seconds of her
life. She felt the sensation of falling in her stomach and
her limbs. Her hair floated around her head. The cold air
rushed past her, touching her cheeks, her arms, her legs,
getting colder as she fell, deeper into the darkness.
Gredic had let go of her and she had let go of him. She
knew he must be falling with her, but she could not see him.
 When she hit bottom, the force of the blow struck her so
hard that it sent splitting bolts of pain through her ribs.
The crash bludgeoned her face as she splashed down into the
churning rapids of an underground river. Her body plunged
deep into the water, propelled by the force of her fall.
There was no up or down, just wild spinning and tumbling over
and over as the current took hold of her and swept her away.
Willa tried to pump her arms and her legs, tried to swim
to what she thought was the surface and take a gasp of
desperately needed air, but the river was far too powerful.
It hurled her through its twisting underground tunnels,
flowing through watery caves and narrow chutes. There was no
surface to reach. No air. Just water flowing through stone.
But she was not alone. She had inside her everything
every creature of the forest had ever taught her. She was
everything every friend had given her. She was a soaring hawk
and a roaring panther. She was a healing bear and a running
wolf. But most importantly at this moment, she was ariver
otter.
She stopped fighting the water, stopped trying to swim
against the current, stopped trying to exert her will. She
tucked herself smooth, and let herself be taken with the
flow, slipping through the water, with the water, part of the
water, like her teachers had taught her. Twist and turn, slip
and slide, the water was her domain.
There was no up or down, left or right, there was only
one direction: the flow of the river. And she propelled
herself through it as fast as she could, knowing that her
only hope lay on the other side of the darkness, the other
side of the caves and tunnels through which she moved. She
didn’t need eyes or ears or other senses. She only needed to
go where the water wanted her to go, and get there as quickly
as possible.
The flow of the river hurled her into a cave with a
pocket of air. At last, her head broke the surface of the
water. She pulled in a blessed breath, filling her lungs with
the cold, damp air of the cave. Then she held her breath and
went back under, continuing through the next tunnel until she
reached the cave on the other side.
The underground river finally emerged out of the caves
and poured fast and smooth through what felt like a world of
giant boulders.
Floating easily on the current now, with her head well
out of the water, she pulled in long, grateful breaths of
air.
Above the water and the boulders and the trees that lined
the river, a thousand stars cast their glistening light
across the nighttime sky. She had never been more relieved to
be alive.
Something floating in the water bumped her shoulder.
Startled, she flinched away from it, and turned to defend
herself.
But when she realized what it was, her heart filled with
a different kind of dread.
Gredic’s body was floating down the river with her. He
had drowned fighting what could not be fought.
She knew she should have been happy to see him dead. But
she wasn’t.
The jaetters had been shattered. Kearnin had died days
before. Ciderg and at least a dozen others had been killed in
the battle. And now Gredic was gone as well.
She knew she should have been filled with triumph that
she had defeated her enemies, but loneliness darkened her
soul. Gredic and the other jaetters had been members of her
clan. She had known them all her life.
A memory from years before came into her mind. Just after
her sister and parents died, she and Gredic were pulled into
the jaetters. The padaran and his guards took her and Gredic
out into the forest alone for their initiation. By the time
the guards were done with them, she and Gredic lay exhausted
and bleeding on the forest floor. Jaetters weren’t born;
they were made. Willa remembered lying there in the dirt and
the leaves, looking over at Gredic on the ground a few feet
away from her. Wincing in pain, she got up onto her feet, and
then she helped him up as well. He limped a few feet away,
picked up two long, spear-like sticks from the forest floor,
and put one of them into her hand. “We don’t give up,
Willa,” he said to her.
As she floated down the river with Gredic’s body beside
her, Willa treaded water over to the river’s edge, reached
up to the low-hanging trees, and pulled a stick from the
branches. Moving through the water back over to him, she
opened Gredic’s cold, white fingers, wrapped them around the
stick, and then let the current take him downstream with his
spear in hand. “We don’t give up, Gredic,” she whispered.
She was left drifting down the river alone now, beneath a
jet-black sky and a spray of stars. It was quiet, almost
peaceful, but there was a faint, orange light flickering on
the smooth surface of the river.
Still treading water, Willa turned and looked back, up
the slope of the Great Mountain. It felt like it was always
there, always watching.
The Dead Hollow lair was on fire. It was a great blaze of
snaking flame and black smoke rising upward into the midnight
sky. From a distance, it almost looked like the Great
Mountain itself was burning.
L eaving Gredic to float down the river without her, Willa
crawled up onto the rocky bank.
The night air hung about her in a drifting haze of gray
smoke and orange flickering light.
That was when she noticed something dripping onto the
ground. It was her own blood.
Over the past few hours, she’d been speared in the neck,
dragged on the floor, slammed against a wall, kicked in the
side, and stepped on. Now that she’d come out of the cold
water of the river and the all-consuming urgency of escape
had faded behind her, her body began to hurt in places she
didn’t even realize could feel pain. Hialeah had bandaged
the bloody wound on her neck, and the twisting roots of the
floor had infused her body with a startling jolt of vital
power, but she knew that she was losing too much blood. She
couldn’t make it very far in this wounded condition.
She gazed up toward the burning lair. She didn’t want to
go back up there, but there was a chance that one area of the
lair in particular had survived the fire, and that it could
help her.
She climbed hand over hand, up through the rocks and
trees, toward the blaze. She watched as the flames consumed
one area after another, the crackling of the burning sticks
and the rush of the fiery wind drowning out all else, as the
odor of burning wood filled the air.
Do not say it out loud until you wish to destroy
everything… Her mamaw’s warning about saying “Naillic”
echoed in her mind. Her old den, the great hall, the homes of
all the Faeran people were being destroyed by the fire. She
couldn’t help but feel the weight of it as she climbed.
By the time she reached Dead Hollow, most of the lair had
burned down into ruined, smoking piles of charred wreckage,
the dry sticks of its old walls and floors providing ample
fuel for its own destruction. Where once there had been a
vast hive of twisted-stick tunnels and rooms, now there was
nothing left but the blackened remains of disintegrated walls
and heaps of smoldering ashes.
All the Faeran of the clan had fled the lair to escape
the fire, so the entire area was abandoned, and most of what
remained was unrecognizable. But there was one small part of
the lair at the bottom of the gorge where the fire could not
go. And that was what she was hoping for.
She climbed through the ashes and debris until she
reached the lowest, oldest part of the lair.
 She had been in this area just a few hours before with
Gredic, but now it looked completely different. All the
woven-stick passageways and walls were burned away, and all
that remained was the labyrinth of stone tunnels and ancient
caves where she and her mamaw had lived.
Willa climbed down inside and then made her way through
the tunnel that led to her den, down the passageway with the
painted figures of the Faeran past. Despite the burning that
had occurred above, the paintings on the stone walls had
survived. She came to the River of Souls, thousands of hands
touching the wall, her mother’s and her father’s, Alliw’s
and her own, the left and the right, the forward and the
back, all together.
W I L L A and A L L I W, she thought, remembering the
strange human symbols.
“Good morning, sister,” she said, touching her living
hand to her sister’s handprint as she walked by. “I’m glad
you made it through.”
Finally, Willa came to the den where her mamaw had raised
her.
Those areas of the floor that had been made out of woven
sticks had burned and were gone. And the intense heat of the
surrounding conflagration had melted and destroyed their
cocoons and all their other belongings. Most of the small
trees and other plants that her mamaw had nurtured in the
small circles of light were wilted from the heat and dead.
All except one.
The little tree was still alive.
She sighed with happiness and smiled. It was sitting in a
stone pot on a stone ledge, protected and safe in its little
niche. It was an ancient tree, miniature in size, its small
branches gnarled with age, but its tiny leaves were green
with living spirit. Her heart warmed to see that the little
tree was waiting for her.
“Hello, my friend,” she said as she moved closer. “I
know it’s probably been difficult to breathe these last few
hours, but don’t worry. I’ll get you someplace safe, with
plenty of light and water and nutrients.”
She took several of the leaves that had fallen from the
tree and pressed them to the wound at her neck. The relief
from pain was immediate. She felt the intense power of the
tiny plant surging into her skin, through her muscles, and
deep down into her blood. One by one, she treated the most
painful of her wounds.
“Thank you, Mamaw,” she whispered softly, not just for
nurturing and protecting the little tree all these years. Not
just for teaching her how to use it, and for the many other
gifts of the mind that she’d given her. But for the love
that had come with it.
“Protect it, hold on to it,” her mamaw had pleaded with
her before she died.
Willa hadn’t understood at the time. But she knew now
that her mamaw wasn’t telling her to hold on to the little
tree, or to the secret of Naillic’s forbidden name, or even
to the ancient lore of the forest. She was imploring her to
hold on to what was in her heart: her love, her compassion,
her sense of her soul; not just her instinct to blend, but
sometimes her willingness to stand up and make herself known,
to throw the spear, to spring the trap, to set things in
motion that cannot be undone.
Her mamaw had been watching the decline of the Dead
Hollow clan for many years, and Willa came to realize what
her mamaw already knew: that the Dead Hollow clan hadn’t
started dying because of the arrival of the day-folk, but
with the rise of the padaran who came after—the quelling of
the Faeran words, the disconnection from the forest, the
drowning of love and compassion and sympathy in a swarm of
fear and malice and control.
Without love there could be no families, no children, no
elders. There could be no future.
As she held the little tree, she came to a realization,
something that she didn’t think she could have understood
before. For years, her mamaw had been unable to fight against
the growing power of the padaran and his control of the
Faeran people. To go against him meant death. Willa realized
now that she herself had been her mamaw’s last try. She was
her last hope, to live and to love and to follow the path of
the heart.
“I’ll protect it, Mamaw, I swear I will. I’ll protect
what’s in my heart,” Willa whispered in the old language.
“I’ll never let it go.”
Willa carried the little tree slowly up and out of the
old stone tunnels and walked through the ashes until she
reached what was once the center of the Dead Hollow lair.
She looked around her at the vast gray field of ashes.
Her premonition that she would never again see the Hall
of the Padaran—the Hall of the Glittering Birds—had been
correct.
The once magnificent walls of the great hall had burned
and crumbled down. The hall wasn’t just empty or damaged. It
wasgone .
The great throne of the padaran had burned into a
charred, blackened heap.
She stepped slowly forward, into the area that had been
behind the throne.
She began to make out a dark shape on the ground. It was
burned and blackened, but she could see the outline of what
was once a leg, and the oblong mass of a scorched and
smoldering head. The knees and elbows were folded up to the
chest. The person had died cowering in fear.
A sickening feeling crept into Willa’s chest. It was the
dead body of the padaran, the charred bones of his gripping
fingers still clinging to his spear of power.
He had run into his private rooms and blockaded his door
to protect his precious human-made objects from the hands of
the mob. He had gathered the looking glass and the other
human-made things all around him, coveting them to the very
end. He was so frightened of losing control of them that he
would not leave, even as the smoke and fire came.
The spear of power and the other metal objects had
survived the fire.
But he had not.
She stared at what was left of her uncle for several
seconds, and then she turned away.
As she made her way out of the burned wreckage of the
lair for the last time, she found a spot in the center of the
destruction.
She knelt down, dug into the ashes and dirt with her
hands, and planted the tree into the ground.
“I know, I know, you don’t want me to leave you here,”
she said gently. “But you just wait and see. You’ll like
this new spot when the sun rises, and the rains come, and the
ashes wash down into the rivers. There will be plenty for
your roots to grow into.”
After a few moments sitting with the little tree, she
rose and started to walk away.
She took a few steps.
But then she stopped and turned and looked back at the
tree, sitting so small and frail in the ashes all alone.
Maybe you don’t have to wait, she thought. Maybe I can
give you a little bit of a head start, help you out, like you
always did for me.
She walked back over to the little tree and knelt down in
the ashes in front of it.
Then she touched her fingers to the tree’s tiny roots
and trunk, and she closed her eyes.
At first, nothing happened, but then she began to softly
sing the song that her mamaw had taught her when she was six
years old, the night her parents and sister died.
The roots of the tree began to extend, reaching down into
the ashes.
“That’s it, little one,” she whispered. “Keep
coming…”
 As the roots pulled the nutrients from the ashes of the
past, the tree began to grow, its branches reaching upward
and spreading outward, the leaves unfurling bright and green,
and the trunk thickening as it reached toward the sky.
It was a song of death and a song of life, of growth and
rebirth, with words as ancient as the mist-filled forests.
Soon the tree had grown as tall as she was, with its
branches as wide as her outstretched arms. “That’s it,
little one, keep coming…” she said again, and the tree kept
growing. It grew and grew, until the trunk was thick, the
branches strong, and the leaves reaching far above her.
Willa smiled as the energy of the tree flowed through her
body and her heart, and her own power flowed through the
tree. And the moment she smiled, the branches above her head
curled and turned and brightened into the shape of glittering
flying birds, glowing with a bounty of blue ghost fireflies,
their sparkling abundance reaching to the glistening starlit
heavens above. She was sculpting like the Faeran of old.
When she was finally done, the magnificent, glowing tree
stood more than a hundred feet tall in the center of the
ashen devastation that had once been Dead Hollow, the moon
shining down through its branches and lighting up the world
around her.
Willa looked up at the tree and smiled with happiness.
“Well, it’s a good start, little one, a very good start
indeed,” she said, her heart overflowing. “I think you’ve
got it from here.”
And only then, with the little tree settled into its new
home, did she rise from her knees and walk away.
A s Willa made her way out of the smoking devastation of the
lair and went out into the nighttime forest, the magnitude of
everything that had happened began to soak into her mind.
The padaran—the god of the clan—was dead.
The ancient lair of her people had burned to the ground.
Gredic would never be able to attack her again.
Her fellow jaetters—her rivals and tormentors—were
gone.
 And the clan was shattered, cast out into the winds of
uncertainty, without shelter, without a leader to bind them
together toward a common cause.
She felt it all, swirling inside of her.
What had she done?
Was she the one who had caused all this? Had she
destroyed the Faeran people?
Too dismayed to take it all in, she just kept walking.
A short time later, she came upon a Faeran boy, a little
bit older than her, wandering alone among the trees, a
stunned look on his face. He was one of the few young Faeran
she’d ever seen who still had spots and streaks like she
did, instead of mottled gray skin. He had been a jaetter like
her and the others, but he had never tormented her, never
stolen her take.
“Are you all right, Sacram?” she asked as she
approached him, but he did not reply. And he did not look at
her.
A jagged cut dripped red down Sacram’s forehead. His
shoulder was burned and bleeding. His hair was singed and his
face was blackened with soot. The boy was mumbling to
himself, but she couldn’t understand him, and his eyes were
glazed, as if he had taken in more than his mind could
absorb.
“Sacram, it’s me, it’s Willa,” she said, touching his
arm, trying to let him know she was there. He did not resist
her or pull away, but he did not respond to her, either.
“I will help you,” she said, taking his arm and leading
him. “Let’s go this way, toward the others…”
As she and the lost boy walked along together, she
wondered what kind of life they would lead now. In the chaos
of a scattered clan, would this boy remain a jaetter like he
had been before? Would jaetters even continue to exist? Would
this boy even survive the winter? Or was he one of those bees
flying around looking for a hive that had been destroyed?
 She walked with Sacram for nearly an hour, down the
mountain, away from the last burning remnants of the Dead
Hollow lair, following the tracks and disturbed leaves that
told her that at least some of the other Faeran of their clan
had fled in this direction.
“Where is everyone?” the boy asked blankly. She wasn’t
even sure if he was speaking to her or himself or to someone
who wasn’t there.
“Where is everyone?” he mumbled sadly again, repeating
himself over and over again.
She knew he needed help. He had seen too much and he was
suffering from clan-shock. But if she could get him back to
the others, then he might get through it.
As she walked along through the forest with the boy, she
came to the decision that she wouldn’t just help him. She’d
help gather all the members of the clan back together. That
was what she needed to do, not just for the sake of the
others, but for her own clan-shock, which she knew was
lodging deep in her leafy soul with every moment that passed.
Now that the padaran was gone, things were going to
change. People were going to need help. They would need to
relearn the ways of the forest. They would need to listen to
their own hearts again and turn to each other, build families
again. They would all need to work together, side by side, to
make a better lair for themselves.
She began to feel an unfamiliar kind of hope in her
heart, the kind of hope that could only come after
desolation, after destruction, a sense that maybe, just
maybe, that which had forever been unchangeable was about to
change.
She picked up a scent in the air.
“We’re almost there, Sacram,” she told the boy. “Some
of the others from our clan are just up ahead. We’ll get you
some food and water, and you’ll be able to see everyone, and
you’ll start feeling well again. It’s all going to be all
right.”
 The boy’s face did not change. It did not light up with
hope. But his walking seemed to gain new strength and speed.
Finally, she spotted a small group of twenty or thirty
Faeran in the forest ahead.
Willa held the arm of the boy as she came upon them, just
to make sure he stayed steady on his feet, and to show the
others that she was a friend, not a foe.
“I just wanted to make sure Sacram found his way,” she
said as she approached. “I’ve come to help in any way I
can.”
At first, no one seemed to see her or hear her. They were
just stumbling along, their eyes staring ahead or down at the
ground.
“I came to help,” she said again, more loudly this
time.
One of the women looked up, and then pointed at her and
shouted, “There she is!”
“She’s returned!” said one of the men.
Willa’s heart leapt that they recognized her and were
welcoming her among them. She was part of the clan again.
She led Sacram over to his mother.
“I want to help in any way I can,” Willa said. “We’ll
gather everyone together. We’ll help each other forage for
food and keep warm.”
“We don’t need your help,” the boy’s mother said,
grabbing Sacram by the arm and yanking him away from her.
“Burner!” one of the men hissed.
“Get out of here, burner!” said another, scowling and
then spitting at her. “We don’t want you here!”
“Destroyer!” the first woman shouted.
Willa stepped back, startled and confused, her heart
sinking in despair. “I didn’t start the fire,” she said,
but they didn’t seem to care.
Many of them had believed in her for a little while, and
they had finally been able to see through Naillic’s blend.
They had swarmed around her and protected her. But most of
her allies had been struck down by the padaran’s guards, and
others had been swept up in the fear of the fleeing crowd.
Fear follows fear.
The Faeran had lived in Dead Hollow for hundreds of
years. It had been their protection, their way of life, their
hive. And she had been the one who had clenched her fist and
raised her voice.
Without the lair, there would be no walls, no warmth, no
protection, no clan, not the way it was before. They didn’t
care what she had said or what she could do. They hated her.
Then she saw one jaetter girl coming forward through the
group. Willa felt a rush of relief. Gillen was alive! Her
face was smudged with soot marks and her shoulder had been
badly burned, but she looked as strong as ever, and she
seemed as relieved that Willa had survived as Willa was that
she had.
“Don’t you see?” Gillen shouted out to the rest of the
group. “Willa has done us a great service! She has defeated
the padaran!”
“You want us to thank her for burning down our home?”
one of the older Faeran sneered.
“She’s given us a new chance!” Gillen said, her voice
filled with hope and determination. “We’re free! We’ll
start over. We’ll build a new lair.”
“Freedom is all fine and good until it snows,” one of
the other Faeran said.
“Or we get hungry,” someone said. “I’m hungry now!”
“Willa is knowledgeable in the old ways,” Gillen
argued. “She can help us!”
“She’s a traitor against the clan!” someone spat.
“Traitor!” called another.
As Willa looked around her at all the faces, it surprised
her that many of the older Faeran in the group appeared to
hate her even more than the others. She had hoped they would
remember the Faeran of old that her grandmother had taught
her about, but instead they seemed the most set in their
ways, the most angry that their lives had been disrupted. But
she could see in the hopeful faces of some of the younger
Faeran that they understood that things could be different
now, that a new kind of clan could be created. When she
looked at her old friend, Gillen met her eyes with a brave
and steady gaze. Willa could see it. Something had changed in
Gillen. Something had kindled a new courage in her, and Willa
knew there would be others like her.
“Now that the padaran’s gone,” Willa said, trying to
move toward her Faeran kin, “we’ll find a better way to
live…”
“Get out of here!” one of the older Faeran hissed, and
chattered his teeth at her.
“Burner!” some of the others started screaming again.
“Burner!”
“I came to help…” Willa said, but she could see that
most of the clan was against her.
It was clear that change would come soon. Gillen and the
others would lead the clan anew. They would begin to find a
better way. But Willa could see that very few wanted anything
to do with her.
Sacram’s mother ran forward and pointed at her, her face
wrinkled with revulsion. “She’s a clan-breaker!” the woman
screamed.
Gillen and several others tried to stop them, but it was
no use.
Many of the Faeran hissed and shouted at Willa. And then
some of the men picked up long sticks from the ground and
charged at her. Others hurled stones. Willa ducked down and
covered her head with her hands and arms as she ran away, the
stones striking her ears and neck and shoulders with painful
blows.
She ran down into the narrow gulley of a stream,
scrambled beneath a fallen log, and curled into a shaking
ball.
 Hiding in that dark little hole, she buried her face in
her hands and wept.
W illa rubbed her eyes, then crawled out from beneath the log.
She brushed the dirt and the centipedes and the little bits
of bark from her hair and her arms, and looked around her.
She had once again been cast from her clan. What was she
going to do now? Where was she going to go? Should she howl
for Luthien? Should she go back to the sacred lake of the
bears? Should she find the mother deer and fawn that she had
met by the stream? She knew she had the knowledge and skill
to live safely in the forest on her own for many years. But
she also knew that a tree needed more than water and soil to
survive.
As she clambered out of the gulley of the stream and came
up onto a mound of high ground, she caught a glimpse of
movement across the river.
Her heart leapt. The black panther and a dark brown
mountain lion were traveling along the edge of the river.
The two big cats were moving quickly and with
determination, traveling east, as if they were on a long
journey over the mountain to some distant land.
They were such beautiful and majestic beasts, filled with
a power and confidence that amazed her. She could see that
they had sustained wounds from some sort of battle, but the
wounds didn’t seem to be slowing them down.
She was so glad to see the cats. She didn’t know who or
what they were, or why normally solitary animals were
traveling the way they were, but she loved how they were
together.
“Good-bye, my friend,” she whispered in the old
language to the black panther, wishing her well wherever her
journey would take her.
After everything that had happened since the night she
was shot, and as she watched the departing panther, she felt
such a profound and aching loneliness, a sense that she was
truly on her own now. But there was something about the
panther that gave her hope as well, hope in friendship, hope
in alliance, hope in a future that she knew she could not yet
imagine. She knew that she wasn’t like the black panther.
She wasn’t fierce of heart or sharp of claw like many of her
animal friends. She wasn’t a leader or a fighter. She had
never raised a weapon or struck a blow against anyone or
anything, and she vowed that she never would. She was just a
Faeran girl, a night-spirit named Willa, trying to find her
way.
 “Willa of the Wood,” she said to herself, knowing a
little better now exactly what that meant.
She had said the words very quietly beneath her breath,
but the moment she spoke them, the black panther stopped on
the trail, turned its head, and looked across the river
toward her. The panther’s yellow eyes stared straight at
her.
Willa’s normal instinct when she was spotted by a
predator was to blend into her leafy surroundings and
disappear. And it would have been easy to do here, easy to
never be seen again.
But that was not what she wanted.
Her heart was beating heavily in her chest, but she held
her blend back.
She wanted the panther to see her.
The panther gazed at her for a long time. Was the panther
wondering where she’d come from and exactly what she was?
Was the panther wondering if she would make a good ally in
the fight against the dark and mysterious dangers of the
world?
Willa held the panther’s gaze with her bright green
eyes.
“Willa of the Wood,” she said again, and she smiled.
She was a creature of the forest, with the lore and spirit of
her grandmother within her. She spoke the old language and
the new. She could sense the movement of the rivers and hear
the whispers of the trees. And she thought that someday, just
maybe, she and this panther might meet again.
A s the hours passed, the smoky haze of midnight flames slowly
gave way to the coming dawn, with Venus, the Morning Star,
rising from the black silhouettes of the mountain ridges, up
into the dark blue of the glowing sky.
As the sun began to rise from behind the Great Mountain,
Willa’s thoughts turned to the humans.
She just hoped that in all the chaos and violence of the
night none of the guards or jaetters had found Cassius,
Beatrice, or any of the other children as they fled through
the forest and down the mountain. Keep running, she thought
to her young day-folk friends, keep running all the way home.
And then she thought about the last of the three human
children to escape through the hole.
Follow the east side of the creek and look for a small
cave in the rocks, she had told Hialeah. Stay quiet and
hidden until morning.
She didn’t know what she was going to do in the world
now that the lair had been destroyed, or where she was going
to go, but she wanted to finish the one thing she had begun:
to make sure that Nathaniel’s children made it home.
She followed the creek toward the spot she had told them
to hide.
As she approached the area, her mind clouded with dark
thoughts she couldn’t control. She’d seen so much fighting
and death. What if the children never made it to the hiding
spot? What if they had been attacked or recaptured?
When she saw Hialeah crouched near the crevice in the
rocks, Willa’s chest flooded with relief.
She’s there, Willa thought. She made it.
Hialeah had light brown skin and beautiful chestnut eyes,
which made a striking combination as she stared out from the
rocks, scanning the forest for danger. Her long, straight
black hair fell evenly on either side of her face, and her
mouth was set in a serious expression. Her plain brown dress
was dirty from weeks of imprisonment and the trek down into
the gulley of the creek, and it was torn where she had used
it to make a bandage for Willa’s neck, but Hialeah looked
strong and capable.
Willa moved forward through the broken tumble of giant
rocks until she was no more than a few steps from Hialeah,
then slowly revealed herself, trying not to startle her.
Hialeah’s face immediately lit up. “You made it!” she
said as she moved toward her. It startled Willa when Hialeah
wrapped her arms around her and pulled her close. Willa
couldn’t help but smile. Hialeah was probably her same age,
but taller and stronger than her, and there was something
invigorating about her embrace. It was a strange and glorious
feeling to be held by this bold human girl, to feel the arms
of her friendship around her.
“Thank you for saving me and my brothers,” Hialeah
said.
“You’re welcome,” Willa said happily.
When they separated, Hialeah looked Willa over more
closely, checking the bandage on her neck.
“The cut…” Hialeah said in astonishment, “…and your
other wounds…They’re almost healed.”
“I got a little help from an old friend,” Willa said.
“You came back!” Iska said enthusiastically as he
crawled out of the cave, holding his little brother by the
hand.
“Sshh! We’re supposed to be hiding!” Hialeah scolded
him.
“It’s all right now,” Iska insisted. “Willa’s here!
She’ll protect us!”
“I don’t know if I can protect anyone—” Willa started
to say, but following his sister’s lead, Iska leapt at Willa
and embraced her, wrapping both his arms around her. “During
the night, we decided we weren’t going to leave this cave
until you got here.”
Willa frowned and looked at him. “I told you that we
wouldn’t see each other again, that you should go home
without me,” she said in confusion.
“We saw the flames during the night,” Iska said. “We
knew something bad happened.”
“We were worried about you,” Hialeah said.
“I knew she’d make it,” Iska said proudly and
defiantly.
“No you didn’t,” Hialeah contradicted him. “You were
fretting about her all night. We all were. Even Inali was
asking about you.”
 Willa was glad to see her friends were all right, and she
was happy to see their smiling faces, but she knew they had a
long way to go before they were home.
And she also knew that it was those same smiling faces
that were going to change everything when the three children
came back into their father’s life.
She felt as if her time with Nathaniel had been as rare
and ethereal as the soft glow of the blue ghost fireflies on
a long, dark night, but his reunion with his real children
would be like the rise of the sun. The faint magic that had
warmed Nathaniel’s wounded heart for a little while would
fade into nothingness in the brightness of the coming day.
And she knew that with his children sleeping at night
down the hall once more, the man Nathaniel would no longer
have a need for a strange, night-spirit creature to be
hanging in a woven cocoon from the ceiling in his room.
She knew all of this, and it filled her with a wilting
sadness, but she tried to stay strong in her heart, clinging
to the idea that she had this one good thing in her life.
“I’ll tell you the way home from here,” Willa said.
“The journey is long and difficult, but just keep following
this creek until it meets the river, and then follow the
river down into the valley.”
“But we don’t know the way,” Iska said with a sudden
firmness that surprised her.
“If you follow the river, you won’t get lost,” Willa
said.
She knew she couldn’t go with them. The pain would be
too great. It was their home, not hers. The man Nathaniel was
their father, not her father. She knew she couldn’t bear to
see them together as a family as she had once been with
Nathaniel. And she couldn’t bear to say good-bye to him
again.
“But what if someone attacks us along the way?” Hialeah
said, seeming to join in with her brother’s sudden and
bewildering stubbornness.
 “The night-spirits have been scattered,” Willa said.
“I don’t think any of the guards and jaetters will be
coming down here.”
“But they might,” Iska said. “They might be scouring
the river, looking for easy prey.”
“They might be very angry about what happened last night
and want revenge on any humans they find,” Hialeah joined
in.
“If they find us, they’ll kill us!” Iska insisted,
nodding his head vigorously. “You’ve got to come with us,
Willa.”
“I’m sorry, Iska, I can’t,” Willa said.
The expression on Iska’s face dropped in disappointment.
“Why not?” he asked, his voice shaking with emotion.
“Your father has been missing all of you terribly…”
she began uncertainly, looking at Iska, Hialeah, and Inali.
“But when he sees the three of you…”
Her words dwindled off. She knew she didn’t have an
answer that she could explain to them. But as they all stared
at her with their determined eyes, she could see they
weren’t going to give up.
“All right,” she said finally. “I’ll take you down
the river into the valley. I’ll get you home, and then
we’ll say good-bye.”
I t would have normally been a four-hour journey down into the
valley, moving along the narrow edge of the river and
climbing over the larger rocks, but with the three humans, it
took much longer. Despite his initial enthusiasm, Iska
struggled to keep up. And although Hialeah did not complain
about carrying Inali mile after mile, Willa could see the
girl was struggling.
 “I’ll take him,” Willa said, gathering Inali into her
arms, and the little human clung to her like a baby possum to
his momma’s fur. When she moved too fast or leapt to a
particularly distant rock, Inali gripped her extra tight and
whispered “Don’t let me go” in her ear.
The children made too much noise when they traveled. They
talked loud. They walked loud. They breathed loud. And their
monotone skin stuck out so conspicuously in the forest that
it was a wonder that this species had ever survived their
journeys through the world. She was sure that every predator
in the area was going to hear their heavy, tromping feet and
see their bright faces and arms.
But on the other side of it, she liked how as soon as she
took Inali into her arms, Hialeah began helping Iska up the
steeper climbs, and sometimes Iska helped her in return,
brother and sister, making their way home. Humans weren’t
always born as twins like Faeran were, but the bond was
there. She could see it.
As they traveled home, they came upon a pack of jaetters
with sharpened spears scavenging along the bank of the river.
Willa ducked down behind a rock with Inali and pulled Iska
toward her. “Shh,” she whispered to Inali, touching his
lips with her finger. Hialeah quickly pinned herself behind a
pine tree. Smart girl, Willa thought. She’s learning quick.
Another time they saw a group of six loggers with axes
and picks trudging along a path through the forest.Just keep
walking, Willa told the men in her mind, as she and the
children hunkered down in the bushes beside the trail.
Working together over the next few hours, they hid and
they snuck, they ran and they climbed, until the spruce and
firs of the mountain slopes began to give way to the leafy
trees of the valley.
Finally, she and the three children came to the pools of
reflecting water that lay in the stones along the bank of the
river. Willa remembered looking into these pools and seeing
her face turn to stars on the night she was shot.
 “We’re here,” she said softly to the others, not quite
able to keep the sadness from creeping into her voice.
“She’s right, this is our part of the river!” Iska
said excitedly, seeming not to notice her solemn tone.
“These are our rocks! We’re almost home!”
As he said these words, Willa’s heart filled with a slow
and quiet sorrow. She knew she would soon be parting from her
companions and on her own again.
They approached the house from the same direction Willa
had that first night she came to fill her satchel. She
remembered worrying about the possibility of a vicious dog
and violent men with killing-sticks. And she remembered
studying the day-folk lair made from murdered trees and
stones broken from the bones of the river.
It felt so different now.
Other than the den she had shared with her mamaw, this
was the only place where she had ever felt like she belonged.
She knew she shouldn’t approach the house. She knew that
it was going to hurt. But she kept walking, Iska on one side
and Hialeah on the other, and Inali in her arms.
The house came into view.
She just wanted to get one last glimpse of the man named
Nathaniel, and then she would go.
But as she scanned the house and the barn and the mill,
she did not see him. He didn’t appear to be outside. And the
house looked quiet and still.
Too quiet and too still.
The empty porch.
The closed door.
The shut-up windows.
The dark rooms.
There was something about it that made her certain that
the house was empty, and that he wasn’t just gone. He was
gone for good.
Iska and Hialeah didn’t seem to notice any of this.
Willa set Inali down. Then the three children ran together
happily and noisily across the grass, up the steps, and
banged through the front door into the house.
Willa watched and listened.
“He’s not here!” Iska said as he ran through the
house, looking in the kitchen and the other rooms.
“He’s gone,” Hialeah said, her voice filled with
confusion and disappointment.
As Willa stepped through the front door into the main
room of the house, she glanced at the spot where Nathaniel
kept his rifle. The rifle was gone, along with the knapsack
he used for long journeys.
Iska dashed up the stairs, ran from room to room, and
then called down to them. “He’s not up here either! It
looks like he’s taken his clothes.”
Willa looked at the mantel over the fireplace. The
photograph of the family that had been there was gone.
He hadn’t just gone hunting. And he hadn’t gone into
town for supplies. He had left for good.
“Why did he leave?” Hialeah said, her voice on the edge
of breaking down.
Willa shook her head.This can’t be, He
she thought.
can’t be gone. I can still smell him.
“W here did he go?” Iska asked.
“He hasn’t been gone long,” Willa said. “I think we
just missed him.”
“We need to go after him,” Hialeah said. Willa could
tell that she was exhausted, but she wasn’t going to give
up.
“But we don’t even know which way he went!” Iska cried
in despair. Willa knew that it wasn’t like him to lose hope,
but the disappearance of his father after all this time was
more than he could bear.
“Don’t worry,” Willa said, touching his arm. “He
can’t have gotten far. There’s one place I know he’ll stop
before he leaves here. We’ll pick up his scent there and
track him. And don’t worry—he leaves big footprints.”
Willa led them outside and across the grass of the front
yard. Hialeah walked stoically beside her, carrying Inali in
her arms, but Willa could tell by her quietness and the stern
look on her face that she was worried. She was the older
sister, the protector, the one who knew what to do, but she
was seconds from tears.
As they walked through the sourwood trees and entered the
meadow, Willa saw Nathaniel at the far end.
He was standing over the graves, his gun and his knapsack
slung over his shoulder, his head hanging low, saying his
last prayers and his last good-bye. It appeared he was
leaving what was once his life, and setting out on a new
journey, perhaps never to return. There had been too much
loss here, too much pain. He had given up hope. And now he
was going to leave the world, the mountains, the forests, all
that he had once loved.
“Papa!” Iska shouted as he ran toward his father.
Hialeah ran quickly behind him, still carrying her little
brother.
Hearing Iska’s shouts, Nathaniel closed his eyes very
hard, as if he could not believe what he was hearing. It was
as if he thought his mind was playing cruel tricks on him. He
clenched his eyes shut, blocking out the pain.
But as Iska ran toward him and kept shouting, Nathaniel
finally opened his eyes and turned.
A look of shock covered his face. His face shifted as if
he wouldn’t allow himself to believe what he was seeing. He
was standing on the graves of his children, but his children
were running toward him.
 And then, all at once, he seemed to give way. Nathaniel
set down his rifle and supplies, and fell to his knees as his
children dove into his arms, shouting and talking and
carrying on. He wrapped himself around them and pulled them
close. The children were ragged, dirty, scratched, and
bruised, but they were here, and they were full of joy.
The man Nathaniel began to sob with tears of relief and
gratitude. He held his children tight as he cried and kissed
them, quickly and repeatedly, one after another, cupping
their faces in his hands and looking at them, then pulling
them close again.
“You’re alive! I can’t believe it!” he was muttering.
“Thank God, you’re alive!”
Iska talked rapidly and excitedly, telling his father
about everything they’d been through, how he was captured,
how he had survived in the prison, how Willa had fed him
cookies, and how they had worked together to escape. The
stoic Hialeah didn’t say a word at first, but as soon as her
father looked at her and gently asked how she was doing, she
broke down and wept in his arms.
Through all of this, Willa remained standing where she
was. In the forest at the edge of the meadow. Very still. Her
eyes watching it all. Her heart beating hard in her chest.
She did not step into the meadow. The meadow was not hers
anymore. The meadow was Nathaniel’s and his family’s. It
was the resting place of family lost and the embraces of
family found, but it was not hers.
She looked up at the Great Mountain, with the mist
clearing from its rounded peak. The mountain knew. The
mountain had been watching all along, and it was still
watching, still with her, and the mountain knew.
As she turned and looked at the humans again, she saw
that Nathaniel finally had what he most wanted in the world.
He had finally found his children.
She breathed in long, slow, deep breaths, ragged and
unsteady, waves of emotion pouring through her, churning up
inside her, but as she watched them, she couldn’t help but
feel something building inside her, just seeing them
together, filled with such happiness and joy. She felt a
great swelling in her heart, almost a sense of pride, a sense
that she had done something worthwhile. And that was all she
could cling to: that she had done what she had set out to do.
Finally, she turned and walked away, silent and
invisible, into the forest in the same way she had come.
As she walked back to the river, she said good-bye to
everyone in her mind.
She said good-bye to Gredic and the other jaetters, and
the survivors of her clan who would find a new way without
her.
She said good-bye to her mother and her father, who had
passed away so long ago.
She said good-bye to her little twin sister, Alliw, who
she’d played with as a child and lived now in the ancient
stone of Dead Hollow.
She said good-bye to her mamaw, who had given her all
that she had become and all that she would ever be, who had
nurtured her and cared for her, from a seed into a tree.
She said good-bye to the boy Iska, who had spoken to her
through the door of his prison cell; and his little brother,
Inali, whom she had carried in her arms; and his bold sister,
Hialeah, who had led her brothers down through the valley
during the night to their hiding spot in the cave beside the
river.
And, wiping tears from her eyes as she walked away, she
said good-bye to the man Nathaniel, who on a frightening
night, after losing everything he cared for, had shown her a
single moment of kindness. And started it all.
Suddenly a large hand gripped her shoulder and turned her
around quite forcefully.
Startled, Willa looked up to see Nathaniel’s bright blue
eyes staring down at her. He and the three children
surrounded her, all looking at her.
 “Where do you think you’re going?” Nathaniel asked.
“I—I—” she stuttered.
“How is all this possible, Willa?” he demanded in
amazement. “How did you do all this?”
Willa thought about the how and the when and the why she
had done what she had done.
Then she looked up at Nathaniel and said, “I just wanted
to do one kind thing.”
As Nathaniel looked at her, his brows furrowed, his eyes
narrowed, and he pursed his lips, as if he was struggling to
understand her. “But where are you going now?” he asked,
his voice filled with sadness.
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
Nathaniel shook his head as if he was frustrated with her
answer. He knelt down on one knee in front of her, held her
gently by the shoulders, and looked into her eyes. “Do you
understand what happened, Willa? You just vanished. After the
loggers attacked, you just left. I thought you had gone for
good. I thought you left me. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
There was nothing left here for me but memories and pain.”
Willa listened to his story in shock. She could hear the
strain in his voice. She had no idea what he had been going
through since she had left.
“But now,” Nathaniel continued, his voice softening,
“with the children back…and with you…Willa, please don’t
leave. You’re part of my family. I love you.”
“We all love you!” Iska said, touching her shoulders.
“Stay with us,” Hialeah said, grasping her hand. “You
can sleep in my room if you want.”
“Or you can sleep in the tree if you want. You can sleep
wherever you want to,” Nathaniel said. “It doesn’t matter.
Just stay.”
Too stunned to talk, Willa gazed around at their
expectant faces. Was this actually happening? Or had she
fallen asleep under the log after being scorned by her clan,
and all this was a dream?
 She had always thought of love as the rarest and most
delicate of things, and that there must be a limit to the
amount of love that a human or a Faeran could give or feel, a
limit to how much love there could be in the world. She had
thought that once the man Nathaniel had reunited with his
real children there would be no place for her. But love
wasn’t the stone. It was the river. Love was like the
glistening stars in the midnight sky, like the sun that
always rises, and the water that always flows.
A part of her deep down inside feared that the more she
loved the day-folk, the less she would love the forest, that
her memory of her forest ways would fade and her powers
dwindle. But here with Nathaniel and his children, it didn’t
feel as if her world was diminishing. It felt as if it was
expanding, growing, changing. Love was infinite in so many
ways. It felt as if she could keep opening her heart to the
magic in the world, and the magic in the world would keep
filling it.
The only way she could live and grow into the girl her
mamaw worked so hard for her to become was with the nutrients
of a family’s earth and the warmth of a family’s sunlight.
Finally, unable to find the words she needed in a
language they could understand, she slowly leaned forward and
put her head against Nathaniel’s chest. Tears welled up in
her eyes, and she wrapped her arms around him.
The three children cheered and hollered, for they knew
what it meant, and Nathaniel whispered, “This is your home
now, Willa.”
Move without a sound. Steal without a trace, Willa
thought, remembering what she’d been thinking that first
night she crept up toward the house.
“I think I may have stolen your hearts,” Willa said.
“And you’ve stolen mine.”
T H E E N D
 Acknowledgments
Willa of the Wood takes place in the Great Smoky Mountains,
straddling the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.
As one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth, the Great
Smokies is not only the most visited national park in
America, it is also the most biologically diverse, with over
1,600 species of flowering plants, 100 species of native
trees, 30 species of salamanders, 50 species of ferns, and
much more.
I would like to thank the Friends of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park, the Great Smoky Mountains
Association, and the US National Park Service for all the
important work they do to manage and preserve this cherished
region of our country.
Special thanks to Steve Kemp for working with me on the
manuscript. He was a wonderful resource and constant stream
of knowledge on the Great Smoky Mountains.
Special thanks to Esther and Bo Taylor—respected members
of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and valiant guardians
of the Cherokee language. Among the many important roles they
play in the community, Esther is the media coordinator at
Cherokee Elementary School and Bo is a storyteller and
archivist, as well as the Executive Director at the Museum of
the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina. Thank you
for your guidance and assistance on the Willa of the Wood
manuscript.
And special thanks to Sara Snyder, PhD, Director of the
Cherokee Language Program at Western Carolina University.
I would also like to thank my editor, Laura Schreiber,
and editor-in-chief, Emily Meehan, and the whole Disney
Hyperion team for their ongoing support and insight. I feel
honored every day to be part of the Disney Hyperion family.
 My deepest appreciation to my wife, Jennifer, who worked
closely and diligently with me on this novel through the
entire process to help shape the story to what it became.
Special thanks to my daughter Camille for our early
morning treks into Willa’s world, our long walks along the
river, our climbs through the moss-covered rocks, and for all
the story notes we took together along the way. May you
always see the many colors of green, Camille. And thank you
to my daughters Genevieve and Elizabeth for their feedback
and ideas on Willa’s story.
Thank you to the team of freelance editors who provided
input on the story: Sam Severn, Jenny Bowman, Kira Freed, and
Jodi Renner.
Thank you to my publicists and managers, Scott Fowler and
Lydia Carrington, for everything they do, and to my literary
agent, Bill Contardi, who started it all.
Finally, I would like to thank the good people of western
North Carolina and eastern Tennessee for your continued
support, encouragement, and enthusiasm.

Robert Beatty
Asheville, North Carolina
ROBERT BEATTY is the author of the #1 New York Times
best-selling Serafina series. He lives in the mountains of
Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and three daughters.
He writes full-time now, but in his past lives he was one of
the pioneers of cloud computing, the founder/CEO of Plex
Systems, the cofounder of Beatty Robotics, and the CTO and
chairman of Narrative magazine.
Visit him online at www.robert-beatty.com.
 Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Acknowledgments
About the Author