“How’d you find your way to Seacliff?” Charlotte repeated in annoyance. “If the path kept shifting, how’d you get here?”
“The acorn. It’s... like a compass. Concentrate on it, and you can feel where the first tree is. That don’t move. If you know about how far you’re supposed to go, and where the place is compared to where the first tree is, you can find it right enough.”
“What’s the first tree?”
Elspeth raised an eyebrow. “Well’n’all, here I thought the villagers wouldn’t tell me anything about the forest on account of their superstitions, but I guess you all just don’t know the first thing about it, do you?”
Charlotte’s head throbbed, whether from the close forest air or this irritating, betrousered woman.
“I know plenty. I’ve lived in the forest’s shadow my whole life.”
“Me, too. Green Streets, that’s what our neighborhood’s called, backs right up to the trees. Or it used to, afore they started cutting ’em down. The first tree’s just what it says on the tin. It’s the first tree that ever grew here. The start of the whole forest. Ain’t a normal tree, either, it’s a big old silver oak—silversilver, I mean, you’d think it a sculpture if you didn’t know better—and it’s massive and it’s ancient.”
“Where did it come from?”
Elspeth shrugged.
“It’s the Oak King’s tree, Gran always said, and the Lord of the Wood is supposed to be his son. I seen it once. Gran took Maggie’n’me to it, God, more’n thirty years ago now. I was barely knee-high to a grasshopper, and Maggie was younger’n that, don’t know that she even remembers. Great silver tree it was, with branches spreading overhead and offerings piled at its foot. All that’s there now is a stump. Tree was cut down three decades ago. The factories were expanding, owners wanted the land, figured no one’d much care if the forest came down because it’d make travel easier. Green Streets cared, God knows. It used to shade our streets, keep us from the worst of the weather, but no one ever asks what we want. Anyway, that’s where I found Maggie’s acorn.” Elspeth sounded wistful. “That’s almost the first thing I remember, Gran taking us to see that tree.”
Something black dripped onto the path before them. The mule wavered, snorting uneasily. Charlotte clutched Elspeth, her heart pounding at the sudden disturbance.
The gig swayed, but Elspeth stopped it, tripped down, and took the mule’s halter, stroking his nose.
“Enough of that, now,” she murmured. He stopped prancing, but his flanks quivered.
Charlotte clambered out. In the middle of the path was a black puddle, viscous and smelling faintly mechanical. Another drop plopped into it from the end of a branch overhead.
Charlotte swallowed. “What is that?”
Elspeth shrugged, but her eyes were troubled. “Don’t rightly know. There’s trees all over like that. Like the forest is sick.”
The black trailed from branch to trunk. Black veins ran the entire length of the tree, so much like those streaking the victims of wood sickness.
Charlotte shuddered, but she was a healer before she was anything. She approached cautiously.
“Lottie—”
Elspeth’s voice was tight, but Charlotte waved a hand at her.
She peered at the veins. They told her nothing except that something in the forest was wrong. She didn’t need a tree to tell her that. Not when villagers were vanishing in the forest or emerging with wood sickness.
Still, she returned to the gig and dug her gloves and one of the glass vials from her medical kit. Another black drip plopped into the puddle. Small enough to drip into the vial, if she was careful. She rolled back her sleeves, tugged the gloves on, and circumvented the puddle to hold the vial to the end of the branch.
“Lottie, what’re you doing?”
Being silly, probably. The tree seemed infected, not as if it were a source of the sickness, and she couldn’t ask what had happened or whether it felt any pain—as if a tree felt pain anyway.
“Like you said, it’s like the forest is sick. This might teach us something about the sickness. How to cure it, or...”
“Lost a foreman to it a year back, and his brother’s a doctor. Ain’t no cure.”
“I know,” Charlotte said churlishly. “That’s why I’d like one.”
She corked the vial, peeled off her gloves, and wrapped them inside out around the vial.
“Careful with that,” Elspeth said sharply. “Mind you keep it away from everything else.”
“There’s nowhere else to keep it, unless you’d like me to hold on to it the whole way through the forest.”
