Something moved among the trees. A shadow darker than the darkness surrounding it. It was massive, with what looked likethe outline of horns or antlers crowning its head. It moved with terrifying speed, darting from the right to the left.
Then it lunged.
Papa’s scream tore through the night as the beast seized him. In the torchlight from the village, I could see only glimpses—enormous claws, glinting teeth, eyes that burned like coals in the darkness.
“I love thee, Isabeau!” Papa’s voice called out, breaking with pain. “Live thy life in my honor!”
Then he was gone, dragged into the depths of the dark forest, leaving nothing behind but the echo of his final words and a trail of disturbed earth.
The villagers around me began to disperse, their relief at being spared palpable. Some muttered prayers, others offered me awkward condolences as they passed. But their words washed over me without meaning. I remained kneeling on the ground, staring at the now-empty bridge, the spilled herbs from my basket scattered around me like the shattered pieces of my heart.
Colette stayed, her arm around my shoulders, her tears mingling with mine. We remained there long after everyone else had gone, long after the torches had burned low.
“Come,” she finally whispered. “Thou canst not stay here all night. The beast... it might return.”
But I couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away from the spot where I’d last seen Papa. The terrible finality of it all crashed over me in waves. He was gone. Sacrificed to a forest that hungered for human life. And tomorrow, when I woke to my eighteenth birthday, I would be utterly alone.
The herbs I’d so carefully collected lay forgotten at my feet, trampled and crushed…useless, just as my knowledge of them had been useless in saving Papa. What good was learning to heal the body when the soul could be so brutally torn away?
My fingers clutched at the locket hanging at my throat. The one Papa had mentioned in his final words to me. It had been my mother’s, and now it was all I had left of either of them.
“Protect me,” I whispered to it, though I knew not from what. The beast had claimed its sacrifice. The village was safe for another year.
But as Colette helped me to my feet and led me away from the bridge, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this night wasn’t truly over. That somewhere in the darkness of the Forbidden Forest, something waited. Not just for Papa, but for me as well.
two
Isabeau
The darkness of my cottage pressed in around me like a shroud, heavy with the silence that Papa’s absence had carved into every corner. I sat motionless by the window, staring out at the moonlit garden where just hours before I’d been harvesting herbs. Blissfully ignorant that by nightfall, I’d be utterly alone in the world.
The cup of chamomile tea I’d mechanically prepared sat untouched on the sill, gone cold hours ago, just like the hope in my chest.
Outside, the herbs I’d so carefully tended swayed gently in the night breeze. Feverfew, yarrow, lavender, and all the different plants Papa had encouraged me to grow and study when other fathers were teaching their daughters to embroider and simper. They looked ghostly under the Harvest Moon’s glow, silvered and strange, as if they too had been transformed by tonight’s events.
My night dress hung loosely around my frame. The thin cotton doing little to ward off the chill that seemed to emanate from inside me rather than from the air. I’d wrapped a woolen shawl around my shoulders. It was the last one Mama had woven before the fever took her four winters ago. Now both of them were gone, and the shawl felt like a pitiful shield against the enormity of my solitude.
I couldn’t bring myself to drink the tea. Couldn’t bring myself to do much of anything but sit and stare and breathe, each inhale a conscious effort, each exhale a small surrender to existing.
The fire in the hearth had dwindled to embers that cast long, dancing shadows across the dining area. I should stoke it. I should eat something. I should sleep. But each of those actions required a will I couldn’t summon.
My fingers trembled as they traced the edge of the oak table where Papa and I had taken our meals together for as long as I could remember. The wood was smooth from years of use and careful maintenance. Papa had crafted it with his own hands before I was born.
“This will still be standing when we’re both dust,”he’d told me once, knuckles rapping against the solid surface.“Good craftsmanship outlives the craftsman, little bell.”
A tear slid down my cheek, and I wiped it away with an angry swipe. What good were tears? They wouldn’t bring him back. They wouldn’t rescue him from whatever fate awaited him in that accursed forest.
The forest.
My eyes drifted toward the window again, beyond my garden to where the treeline marked the beginning of the forbidden territory. It was too far to see from my cottage, but I knew it was there, dark and waiting, the beast somewhere within its depths, and Papa with it.
What if I went after him?
The thought slipped into my mind like a thief, sudden and unwelcome. No one had ever returned from the forest, not even those who went in by choice. Lovesick youths looking for privacy, or even adventurous children on a dare. They all vanished, swallowed by the darkness beneath those ancient trees.
But what did I have to lose now?
I rose from my chair, legs unsteady beneath me, and crossed to the mantle where Papa had mounted the hunting knife his own father had given him. My fingers had just brushed the handle when reality crashed back over me.
