“But once I’m done,” he added, “it’s really bedtime, and no arguments.”
“Okay.”
Arthur held out his pinkie. “Promise?”
Sasha linked pinkies with him and shook. “Promise.”
Turning away, Jonas pulled their pillow back over their head so as not to be a party to the misbehaving on the other side of the screen.
Arthur settled in beside Sasha. She hugged her rag doll, wiggling her toes in anticipation.
“Once upon a time,” Arthur said, because his father had always started the story that way, “the forest was far greater than it is now. It stretched for miles and miles to the north and east. The—”
“The Lord of the Wood guided lost travelers!” Sasha said, bouncing.
“Are you telling the story or am I?”
“You are.”
“Don’t interrupt, then, please, and stop bouncing.”
She obliged.
“Thank you,” Arthur said. “The forest was so big you simply had to go through it, no matter where you were headed. If you went around, it took weeks and weeks—if you got around at all. But—”
“But travelers got lost all the time,” Sasha said with relish. Having recently grown interested in all things macabre, her favorite part of any story was when people were in terrible danger. Given the family’s losses, one might have expected her preferences to run differently in regard to this particular story, but Arthur supposed it was cathartic for her in some way. The stories had been the same for him after George’s disappearance.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell the story?”
“Get to the good part!”
Arthur laughed. “I’d get there faster if you’d let me tell it how I please. Yes, travelers got lost all the time because the wood was so big... and the paths shifted. The trees were alive, people said. No one ever saw them move, but they must have, because the paths were never the same from one day to the next.”
The forest had, in fact, been called Shiftleaf for this reason. Now it went by no name at all. The villagers said the man who spoke the forest’s name would be its next victim.
“Luckily, the travelers had a protector.” Arthur paused dramatically, half expecting Sasha to interrupt again, but she didn’t. “The Lord of the Wood.”
“Iknewit,” she whispered, like she hadn’t heard the story before.
“He was a stag,” Arthur continued. “A magnificent red deer who emerged from nowhere to guide lost travelers to the edge of the wood and vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared. As long as he was guiding you, nothing could harm you—not wind nor weather nor wild beast.”
The only thing the story needed was a good romance. Alas, unlike Arthur’s small collection of novels, this story had no romance whatsoever.
“Your granddad saw him, once.” Sasha fidgeted, no doubt because she wanted Arthur to skip ahead to the part where hergrandfather had almost died, but Arthur could never resist an opportunity to tell the children about George. “He grew up right here in Seacliff. A long time ago, when he was a young man, he left for Port Lorne to study medicine. But not long after entering the wood, he got lost.
“Granddad was a smart young man, and he knew how to survive in the wild. He’d studied all sorts of plants in preparation for medical school, so he knew which ones to eat when his supplies ran out, which ones to heal his wounds when he got injured, and which ones to avoid. But as the days stretched into weeks, he worried he’d never make it to the city. The path kept shifting, like he’d always heard. Sometimes he thought he was going in circles. Other times he thought he was hopelessly lost in some deep, dark part of the forest. Then he came down with a fever, after a cold, wet, rainy night when he’d gone without shelter, and he began to think he would die.”
“Then what happened?” Sasha asked, as if she didn’t know. Jonas sighed.
“The Lord of the Wood found him. He led your granddad into the deepest part of the forest... and turned into a man.”
“What!”
“Sasha,” Jonas said in a long-suffering (if muffled) voice from under their pillow.
Arthur chose to ignore both of them. “At first, Granddad thought he was hallucinating because of the fever. But there he was, sure enough—a man who looked like he’d grown from the forest itself. He had eyes like sunlight in the trees, and hair like shadows, and he was dressed all in leaves and flowers.”
Try to picture the Lord of the Wood as described by his father though he might, Arthur always envisioned him as one of the heroes on the covers of his novels, complete with flowing hair and bare chest. He wasn’t sure why.
