“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t go. Not yet.”
Elspeth nodded. “All right, Lottie. All right. One day more.”
xxxiv. In which Arthur falls into a fog
Arthur’s arms were leaden after carrying the cat for hours, but he wouldn’t put her down. She’d curled against his chest and started purring and hadn’t let up.
His tears had dried, but he kept thinking:Why did I ever come here? What was I thinking?
Everything was a mess. He’d lost track of the days, but probably Mrs. Livingston’s cousin was dead. The clock might’ve sold to someone else. Charlotte was in the forest, and maybe she was dead, too. Arthur’s grand adventure had been danger and misery and a plant creature that had hated him on sight, and far too many wet socks, and injuries that, though magically healed, throbbed periodically, as did his back. The only good of the whole situation had been Ira.
Now Ira was a beast. And they’d said terrible things to each other. And Arthur would probably die alone in the forest, without reaching the heart of the wood, and so would Charlotte, and the children would never know what had happened, and Ira would be a beast forever—or until the forest succumbed to wood sickness, and he died, too.
No wonder Arthur had been so afraid of getting everything he’d ever wanted. Reality never lived up to one’s expectations;it burst the shining bubble of one’s dreams. Better to never have a chance of achieving them. Then one could take comfort imagining they might one day come perfectly true. The wood might prove enchanting instead of bedeviling.
The one upside—if it could be called that—was that Arthur thought he understood, at last, why his father had not told them more about the Lord of the Wood. Why he’d spun a story of a forest prince, met once and left in gratitude. Had anyone asked Arthur about the Lord of the Wood now, he might’ve done the same.
The thought brought little comfort. It restored George’s memory, but it sank Ira’s: The reality of him hadn’t lived up to Arthur’s imaginings.
His stomach twisted. That was hardly fair, was it? Blaming Ira for being a person who got scared and angry and irrational. For not resembling the mental image Arthur had carried so long—not only of the Lord of the Wood as George had described him, but of the romance that might one day sweep Arthur away as it swept away the heroines in his novels.
Not for the first time, Arthur wondered what his father would’ve thought of what had happened between him and Ira. He wanted to believe George would’ve accepted it without question, the way he’d always accepted Arthur without question. He’d always seen things differently than most of Seacliff, perhaps because he—like so few villagers then—had ventured beyond it.
But Arthur remembered his father’s hesitation when he’d asked about the old fisherman and his friend, the answers George had given. George had never hesitated before or since when answering his children’s questions, not even (to Arthur’s immediate regret) when Arthur had asked where babies came from. If George had hedged his answer, it must’ve been because he found the truth shameful. After all, he and Eileen hadbeen a unit, and Eileen had been deeply uncomfortable with anything odd about Arthur the older he’d grown.
Not Charlotte, though. When she was twelve, she’d snorted and said,Howsilly, about their mother refusing to teach Arthur to bake biscuits, and taught him herself. When she was fifteen, their mother had found one of his novels lying around, and Charlotte had claimed it was hers. She’d pretended to read until their mother turned back to her needlepoint. That night, after Eileen had fallen asleep in the room she’d shared with Charlotte, Charlotte had snuck into Arthur’s room and shoved the book into his hands.
I don’t see how you can read anything sosaccharine.
The sex scenes are quite good, Arthur had said, even though the sex scenes were the least important bit to him, and she’d made him flip to one to show her. He’d been mortified as she’d sat on the edge of his bed and read it with interest. With the same practicality of her later years, she’d told him she might as well learn about sex from his romance novels if their mother wouldn’t tell her anything about it, as seemed likely. Eileen teased Arthur periodically about sowing wild oats, only asking that he didn’t get any girls into trouble, but she’d told Charlotte that good girls needn’t concern themselves with such things until marriage—even though Charlotte had pointed out she could hardly perform her marital duty if she didn’t know what it was.
That was something, Arthur thought hopefully. Charlotte had always been there for him in a way no one else ever had. If anyone would understand about him and Ira, it was her. He didn’t know whether he’d tell her, if she were to appear before him this moment—though it seemed an awfully big secret to keep—but he hoped he’d have the chance to decide.
“I will,” he mumbled into the cat’s fur. “I will. I’m going to replant the heart of the wood, and then—”
Then he’d find his sister, somehow, and he’d throw himselfat her and promise never to leave again. The wood would be the beautiful place of enchantment he’d always imagined, the cottage would be as he’d left it, and they’d all live happily ever after. Even if it was harder to pretend he wasn’t lonely, now.
Freya squirmed in his arms. He set her down, stretching. His elbow ached; he’d had one hand clenched around the acorn at his neck the whole way. The acorn, warm and alive, was guiding him to the heart of the wood.
The forest was silent. Yesterday’s wind had died away. No leaves rustled. No birds called. No creatures slunk across his path, although perhaps that was for the best: He didn’t care to see another deer or bird with translucent skin showing its ribs or skull or vertebrae.
The silence unnerved him, however. Arthur held his father’s watch to his ear to hear it ticking. The quiet, constant sound calmed him.
Ever more trees oozed black down their trunks. Arthur steered as far from them as he could. He didn’t know what the ooze would do if it touched him, but he remembered it corroding the tip of his shovel days ago.
“Do you think we’re close?” he asked Freya.
As usual, she didn’t respond. Instead, she gazed up the trunk of a nearby birch, tail twitching. Claws outstretched, she shot toward it.
“Freya?”
With a chitter, a small green creature darted out of the foliage above. Blue cap mushrooms sprouted in its wake. The creature was a person, if people were a foot tall and mossy, with hair that trailed into their body and clothes or maybewastheir body and clothes. It vaulted from the birch to a nearby aspen, skirted down the trunk with the cat in pursuit. Then it darted up Arthur’s body.
He flinched at the tickle on his trousers, his shirt. The creature scurried up him like a squirrel. To his relief, the blue caps it trailed didn’t follow, nor did the cat. Growling, she glared at the thing but sat lashing her tail at Arthur’s feet.
The creature peered into his face with eyes as brown and ancient as a tree.
“Oh,” he breathed.
