“Please?”
Nothing.
“I just want to go home. Let me go. Please.”
Determined to escape, he tugged thorny canes apart. The forest was enchanted; surely the bridge had magically repaired itself since yesterday. If he could just get through these damn brambles, he could cross the bridge and go home.
He lost his grip on a cane. It smacked him in the face. He stumbled back, clutching a cheek scratched so deeply it bled. His throat closed up; he wanted to cry.
“Please,” he whispered.
Freya braved the snow to wind around his legs comfortingly. He sat, heedless of the damp and cold, and rested his chin on his knees. He’d get home. He’d find another way out of here, no matter what Ira said. Somehow.
“It won’t have grown back, you know.”
Arthur’s head jerked up. Ira stood before him with a cord of wood in his arms. His antlers gleamed in the gray morning light, as did the claws on his massive wolf’s paws. Calyx trailed behind him, shrinking and morphing into a shape not unlike a cat. Freya glared, unamused.
“What?”
Ira stowed all but a couple logs beneath the table. “The bridge. The forest could regrow it, but it won’t.”
“Why not?”
“The better to keep me here.”
Arthur got to his feet. “So when you said you don’t leave the vale...”
Ira gave a slantwise smile. A wolfish smile. Arthur shuddered.
“The forest makes it difficult.” The smile vanished. “You must be cold. Come inside. Let’s take care of that scratch.”
Arthur glanced back at the brambles. He’d only hoped the bridge had grown back, but he’d been certain the brambles would let him through. Now they seemed determined to keep him here.
Inside, Ira wiped blood from his cheek and dotted a salve on the scratch. Calyx stood guard beside him.
“No harm done. It’ll heal before you know it.”
Ira stirred up the coals in the stove. To Arthur’s relief, Calyx turned away. It dragged itself into Ira’s empty armchair and draped itself over the whole thing.
“It’s trying to protect me,” Ira said suddenly. “The forest.”
Huddled in his own chair, Arthur said nothing. Freya jumped into his lap.
“It thinks I’ll be safe as long as I’m in the vale,” Ira continued. “As long as nothing changes. That’s why it’s always winter here. Nothing changes in winter, the forest thinks. It’s right, a bit. That’s why the wood’s sickness hasn’t infected the vale yet.”
He crouched beside the stove with a log.
“Of course, it won’t work.” The log went into the stove. “One day, the sickness will spread here as it has everywhere else. I’ll die, and the forest will die with me.”
He didn’t sound upset by this, merely resigned.
Despite himself, Arthur felt a kinship with the Lord of the Wood. As Seacliff had been dying a slow death since the draining of the fishing grounds, Ira’s home was dying a slow death from wood sickness.
“Is all this because the heart of the wood was chopped down?”
Ira stiffened but said, after a long moment, “There’s something I should show you.”
He rose with a soft groan, rubbing his knee, and glanced at Arthur.
