Page 13 of A Serpent in the Garden

What a child.

Serich came up to walk beside me as soon as the trees allowed it. “How did it find you?”

“I don’t really know,” I said, but I could tell you the exact moment it happened with sharp, stinging clarity. I had been on horseback in broad daylight near the no-man’s land which lay between the village and the wood, not close enough to fear something within it would reach out and snatch me, but apparently close enough.

The horse had erupted with a terrified bellow and bucked me from its back. I’d been lucky I hadn’t broken any bones. I hadn’t felt Its presence immediately, but it had to be that moment. No animal has ever let me near it from that point forward.

“I think I was probably the closest person to the wood the day whatever cursed It went looking for a body.” We were moving faster now, trees flashing past on either side of us, dank earth and rot threading up our noses. “It claims not to know why I was chosen. I’m pretty sure I believe it. It was so angry in the beginning.”

Serich’s eyes cut to mine. “It took it out on you?”

“Its never harmed me. Ours is a fragile peace. Or it was, until recently.”

“And Its with you, always.” He suppressed a shudder, gripping his weapon tighter. “Not even a moment alone.”

“It retreats each morning,” I said. “As far as It can. It gives me a few hours to wake without it, get ready for the day. I suppose It values its privacy enough to let me believe I have some as well.”

Serich’s expression turned uneasy. As if he thought I were defending It. I wasn’t, not truly. But I like to give credit where credit is due. It could have been much crueler than it was. It had never harmed me. If It were to be believed, the only person it had ever harmed had deserved what It gave him.

That didn’t mean I was glad of the blood on my hands. It had worn out its welcome and it only had itself to blame. I might have never tried for an eviction if It had never lashed out.

Do you hear me? I said. This is on you.

Nothing.

I had been listening to the wood with my whole body, the way It had taught me, glad of the knives strapped to my hip, glad It had ever grown bored enough to teach me anything at all, because the lessons were coming in handy.

I heard it, even in this waterlogged, silent place, before I saw it.

Something large and black stepped into our field of vision, perhaps twenty yards up. I’d been about to yank Serich’s arm and dive behind the nearest tree for cover when he grabbed me, slinging me against his chest as he drew us against the chalky bark.

“What is it?” I breathed into the hollow of his throat.

I felt his pulse against my cheek, boundless, bunny-quick. “I’m not sure.”

“An animal? One of those things that call from the wood?” Those creatures had, I assumed, the look of a human, because they had the voice of one. That thing I’d seen the night It killed John Dale had looked like a child.

Serich shrugged helplessly: I don’t know.

I peered around his shoulder and the thick trunk of the tree. Serich’s hand contracted on my waist, but he didn’t pull me back.

Hooves and horns took shape first as I squinted. A stag, but a stag unlike any I’d ever seen. Massive yet skeletal, as though no meat lay beneath its coat. Smooth black flesh clinging tightly to overgrown bones. Vaporous mists drifted around the antlers, and it was the antlers that frightened me, monstrous and twisted, sharpened like blades, nearly as tall as I was. How could the beast even lift its head?

“Stag,” I whispered. I’d leave it at that for now.

“Should we wait until it passes?”

I eyed the pops of glutinous crimson at the stag’s snout. “Definitely.” The creature seemed slow and sedate at present but I hadn’t any idea how fast it could move if it caught something in its sight.

There was something darkly beautiful about it, though. Once you got used to the antlers you noticed the ivy spiraling about them, how beaded dew shone from those knifelike prongs. The eyes were dead black but large and liquid-looking, the lids low and sleepy.

An odd sense of relief swelled in my chest. The wood had begun to show its true self. I knew we’d have worse than a carnivorous stag to deal with soon, but this I could handle.

Off to bed with you, I thought, when the stag eventually began picking a delicate path through sodden leaves and shrugged off through a stand of trees.

“It’s gone.” I pushed myself off of Serich, but he clapped a hand over the one I had braced against his chest.

“No fellows following it?” he whispered, the warmth of his hand seeping into mine.