The plant creature rustled importantly.
“You’ll need to follow me,” the beast told it. “And you’ll need to carry her.”
Calyx unwound from Charlotte and exploded with growth. New vines and branches grew and thickened, wove through each other, until the plant creature was twice the size and vaguely the shape of a horse. It tossed its faux-head proudly.
Charlotte touched its viny leg. “My goodness. I didn’t know you could do that.”
“It’s never done it before. I don’t know how long it’ll hold.”
Vines wrapped around Charlotte and lifted her onto Calyx’s broad, leafy back, then formed into a chair. More vines slung across her lap and chest and around her medical kit and cane.
“Keep up,” the beast said to Calyx.
He shivered into a raven—larger than a normal raven, with moss creeping through his feathers. He perched on the plant-horse’s neck, head cocked at Charlotte.
Her skin prickled. Something like wonder sprouted through the determined practicality she kept herself cloaked in. She stroked the bird’s back.
The raven took off. The plant-horse reared up—Charlotte gripped its mane of tendrils with a gasp—andleaped. It cleared the vale in one bound, flying over the remaining brambles. Ahead, the raven croaked encouragingly. Out in the forest, the plant-horse slung itself forward, somewhere halfway between galloping and swinging through the trees. Charlotte clung tightly as it followed the Lord of the Wood through the forest to find her children and her brother.
xxxix. In which Arthur has an encounter with a bear
Arthur and the children straggled onward. Despite the acorn, he thought they might be going the wrong way. Ever more trees dripped with black ooze as they passed. The few animals they saw showed skulls, ribs, and pelvises through their skin.
Jonas pressed so close to him it became hard to walk. Freya rubbed against their legs over and over, mewling. Sasha, quiet, clung to Maurice’s neck. The gelding’s pace slowed until he was almost creeping.With his size, it would have been funny, if the forest hadn’t crawled with unease. If the forest hadn’t been sosilent.
It was a wintry silence, cold and muted as if a foot of snow had been on the ground, though it wasn’t. Branches encased in ice looked like glass. Frosted leaves crunched underfoot.
“Look,” Jonas whispered.
All around them were trees like those in the vale. Twisted into human shapes. Arthur shuddered away from them, picturing Charlotte’s face in a gnarled trunk.
She wasn’t a tree, he told himself. She was fine. Wherever she was.
The anthropoid trees made it harder to believe.
“Who are they?” Sasha whispered.
“No one, duck,” Arthur said, though he knew otherwise. “They’re just trees.”
“They’re not shaped like proper trees,” Jonas said.
The iced-over branches stuck up at odd angles, like arms raised in terror. Knots and cavities gaped like eyes and mouths. Roots thrust up as if all the trees had been frozen in the midst of fleeing some disaster. Half-dead birds, translucent and skeletal, whistled thinly from branches. Other birds, entirely dead, littered the leaf mold.
Arthur shivered, clutching Jonas’s hand and walking so close to Maurice that he kept bumping into him.
Perhaps the forest had had a reason for preventing them from coming this way.
The human trees persisted. They ought to have heeded the forest, Arthur thought, and not gone so persistently northward, but he wasn’t sure they could’ve reached the heart of the wood otherwise.
He wasn’t sure they’d reach it in this case, either. He couldn’t stop imagining them turning into trees themselves and wished, for the first time, that the children weren’t with him. Pointless, that. He couldn’t have sent them home through the forest alone. They were here, and that was that.
The ice kept the black ooze from spreading. That was his only comfort.
“Who’s that?” Jonas asked suddenly.
“Who’s—”
A boy. Overgrown with moss, his skin and clothes hardening into bark. And Arthur recognized him.
