It was noon when we walked into the Thornwood, and ten paces in, it was night.
Not dark like a room with the shutters closed. Dark like being under a blanket. The thorns met over the road and locked, and the light that got through was green and thin and didn’t seem to reach the ground. Every trunk was black. Every branch had its knives. And it was quiet, the ordinary kind, no birds, no wind, just our boots and Skritch’s claws clicking on the stones.
“I don’t like it,” said Skritch.
“Nobody likes it.”
“Skritch especially doesn’t like it.”
We had the map out, both halves, Ilsa holding hers next to mine. The road went in a long way, and then there was a place where the spiky trees stopped and the broken shapes began, and right at the edge of them, Aldo’s mark. Here. Safe.
“A day,” said Ilsa. “If the road’s a road.”
It wasn’t, after the first hour. It was a track. Then it was a gap between thorns that something had been through before us. We never saw the three men. But every so often, in the mud, there’d be a boot-print, big, going our way, and not one of us said anything about it.
The wolves came at the end of the day.
I’d heard of thornwolves. Everybody’s heard of them. I’d thought they were a story grown-ups tell to keep you out of the forest, like the Low Streets were a story.
I’m going to stop thinking things are stories.
The first one came out of the thorns ahead of us, and I thought it was the thorns. It was the same black, and its back was all bramble, thick and spiked and grown into the fur, so that when it stood still it looked like a bush. Then the bush opened its eyes. Yellow. Then the bush opened its mouth.
“Don’t run,” said Ilsa.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I was saying it to me.”
A second one, to the left. A third behind, between us and the way we’d come, and I heard it before I saw it, a sort of dry creak as it moved, like a hedge in the wind.
They came in slow. That’s what wolves do. They let you see them.
“Ilsa,” I said. “Fire.”
“There’s a forest.”
“I know there’s a—”
“If I throw a flame in here, Wick, we’re not getting eaten, we’re getting cooked.”
She was right. The thorns were dry as kindling. One flame off her palm and the whole wood would go up with us in the middle of it.
The first wolf was fifteen paces off. It had gone low.
“The rain,” I said.
She looked at me. Then she had the bag open.
“Cast fire at the same time,” I said. “Small. Tiny. Just the sparks. I need both.”
She smashed the jar on a stone and said the word in the same breath.
For a second it rained. Right there, a fist of rain, cold on my face, and the sparks that came off it were blue-grey, lighter than the river’s, drifting like they hadn’t decided which way was down. My left hand took them. Rain is river that hasn’t landed yet, I thought, and I don’t know where that came from, but it was right.
Her flame stood up and went out. Gold sparks. Right hand.
The wolf jumped.
I slapped my hands together.
Fire and rain. And what came out of my hands wasn’t fire and it wasn’t water. It was steam. A huge rolling cloud of it, white and hot and wet, going up and out from between my palms with a hiss like a whole kitchen, filling the gap between the thorns, filling the track, filling the air, so thick and white that I couldn’t see Ilsa and she was holding my sleeve.
The wolf came through it.
I heard it. I felt the wind of it going past my face. It hit the thorns behind us and crashed and yelped, and somewhere to the left another one was crashing about, and a third, and none of them could see, and none of them could smell anything but hot wet nothing.
“Down,” I whispered. “Down, down.”
We got down. All three of us, flat in the mud under the white, with the steam rolling over us and the wolves blundering about in it, creaking and snapping. One of them stepped on my hand. The left one, which was lucky, because two of the fingers on it hadn’t felt anything since the river anyway. It didn’t know. It went on.
I counted. I got to ten four times.
Then the creaking went away. Off into the thorns, all three, the way wolves go when the thing they were hunting has turned into weather.
The steam thinned. Ilsa’s face came out of it, wet and white and furious.
“You didn’t say steam.”
“I didn’t know steam.”
“You slapped your hands together.”
“It worked.”
She lay back in the mud and stared up at the thorns.
“It did work,” she said. “I’m so tired of it working.”
RECIPES (so far)
- Fire + fire = BIG flash. Lost eyebrows. Do not repeat.
- Fire + light = WHITE fire. Burns the Quiet. Burns nothing else. Lasts till morning.
- Frost + river = ICE. A lot of it. Freezes eels. Freezes me.
- Fire + rain = STEAM. Big cloud. Good for hiding. Wolves hate it.
We slept in a hollow under a fallen trunk, with Skritch curled in a ball with his tail over his nose, and me on watch, and then Ilsa on watch, and nothing came. In the morning the green light came back, and we walked, and around midday the thorns opened out, and we were there.
The ruins.
I’d expected walls. There were walls, in a way. Low ones, broken, grown over, going off in lines through the trees. But mostly there were stones. Enormous ones. Blocks as big as the Drowned Lantern, lying tipped over in the moss like somebody had been playing with them and got bored, and all of them carved, and all the carving worn away to nothing. It went on. The whole forest ahead of us was full of them, and the thorns grew up between like they were holding them down.
And at the edge, where the map said, a tree.
It was dead. It had been dead a long time, a huge grey oak, hollow right through, with a split in the trunk you could’ve driven a barrel through. And at Aldo’s height, on the bark, scratched with a knife:
~ # o
Here. Hidden. Safe.
I’ll tell you something. I’d been walking for three days to get to that tree, and when I saw the mark I had to stand there a minute with my hand on the bark. The left one. The two white fingers still couldn’t feel it, and I didn’t care, and nobody said anything, and I’m grateful for that.
The camp was behind the tree.
I’d known it would be. I still wasn’t ready.
Four tents, or what had been four tents. The canvas had rotted and come down and lay over the poles like wet washing. A fire-pit, black, with a ring of stones round it and a cooking pot still sitting in the ash. A shovel stuck in the ground. A tin cup on a stone. Someone’s boot.
Fourteen months. Nobody had been back.
“Skritch doesn’t like this either,” said Skritch, very quietly.
“Look for marks,” I said. “Anything scratched. Anything with a wave.”
We looked. Ilsa went through the tents. Skritch went round the stones, nose down. I went into the tree.
Inside the hollow it was dry, and dark, and smelled of mushrooms, and when my eyes got used to it I saw the shelf. A natural one, where the wood had rotted back. And on the shelf, wrapped in oilcloth, exactly like the tin and exactly like the packet, a book.
A notebook. Small. Cheap. The kind you buy at the market for a penny. The cover was damp and the pages had gone wavy.
I sat down in the mouth of the tree, in the green light, with Ilsa one side of me and Skritch the other, and I opened it.
I’m not going to give you all of it. Some of it’s mine. But here are the bits that matter, in Aldo’s pencil, in Aldo’s spelling, which was never great.
Day 3. Dug all day. Blisters. The crew boss is called Vosk. Big man, leather mask over half his face, wheezes like a bellows. He’s not the one paying. He takes orders from someone else. The client. Nobody’s seen him. He never comes down here. Sends word by rider.
Ilsa’s finger was on the name. “Vosk,” she said. “The wheezing one.”
“The one who grabbed me.”
Day 12. Found the top of something. A curve of stone, under the big block. Not a chest. Too big for a chest. Vosk sent a rider back to the city the same hour.
Day 20. Supplies came. The client sends sweets down with them, every time. Peppermints. Box after box. Vosk hates them, says they stink. I eat them. Nobody else will.
Skritch said, “What’s peppermint?”
“A sweet,” said Ilsa. She was looking at me. “The Professor had peppermints.”
“Hettie’s got a jar of them behind the bar,” I said. “Half of Saltmire eats peppermints. Everybody’s gran.”
“Lots of people like peppermint,” said Skritch, who had never had one, and we left it.
Day 31. It’s a door. Round. Stone. Bigger than the Lantern is tall. The crew want to leave. Vosk’s men have the only boats and the only horses. We’re not a crew. We’re diggers who can’t go home.
Day 33. Vosk’s sending me to the city with the cart for supplies. Three days. I’m taking the map. He doesn’t know I’ve got it. It’s the old one, from the Library, and it shows the way DOWN — the old stair to the front of the door. They’ve found the top. Without the stair they’ll be digging for months yet. Good. I’ll hide it where only Wicky can find it, and leave him word. Then I’ll come back. Because if I don’t, they’ll go to the city looking for me, and they’ll find him.
I had to stop there for a bit.
Ilsa didn’t say anything. Skritch put his paw on my knee.
Then I read it again, and two things came to me, one after the other. He’d cut the post that week. Not before he left. That week, with a cart waiting. And he’d stolen the map from the Library and then hidden half of it in the Library. That’s Aldo.
Day 40. Bad day. A fall in the dig. One of the lads was under it, in the dark, with his lamp out and the rock coming down. I didn’t think. I pulled the lamp-sparks and lit the way and dug him out with it. He’s alive. But Vosk saw.
He looked at me like I was a chest of gold.
I’ve been so stupid.
Lamp-sparks. Pulled, the way I pull them. He’d had my whole life to show me, and he never had once.
Day 41. They’re taking me down tomorrow. Down to the door. Vosk says the client’s very pleased. He says the client’s been looking for someone like me for a long time, and now he’s got one, and he thinks there might be two.
I’ve hidden this. The marks will bring you to it, if you’ve ignored me, which you have. Course you have.
Wicky. Go home.
That was the last page.
I closed the book and sat with it in my hands and looked out at the fallen tents, and the cold fire, and the shovel, and the boot.
“A year,” said Ilsa, softly. “A year in there. Under that.”
“He’s alive,” I said.
“Wick—”
“They need two. Gran said it. He said it. They need two of one blood or the door doesn’t turn. They haven’t got me yet. So they need him alive until they do.” I put the notebook inside my shirt, against the map. “He’s alive.”
Nobody argued with me. I think they wanted it to be true as much as I did.
The light was going. In the Thornwood that doesn’t take long. One minute the green is there and the next it isn’t, and the dark comes in between the stones like water into a boat.
Skritch had found a lamp in the ruin of the tents. An old iron one with a bit of oil still in it, which he’d been very pleased about, because it was shiny. “Skritch found a lamp,” said Skritch, for the fourth time, in case we’d forgotten he was the kind of person who found lamps. Ilsa lit it with a word, and we sat in the mouth of the hollow tree with it between us, and ate the last of the fish, and didn’t talk much.
I was on first watch. I had the notebook in my shirt and the lamp by my knee and the whole ruined forest in front of me, and I was thinking about the three crosses on the map, and the door, and my brother standing in front of it, and I didn’t notice the lamp for a long time.
Then I did.
It was dimmer. Not much. I thought it was the oil. I turned the wick up. It got dimmer.
My breath went out in front of me in a little white cloud.
Beside me, Ilsa said, “Wick,” in a voice that was all the way awake.
The ash in the cold fire-pit had gone white. Not ash-white. Frost-white. And it was growing, out across the moss, between the stones, towards the tree, in fingers.
I looked up.
Between the great fallen blocks, in the dark where the lamp didn’t reach, grey shapes were moving. Not towards us. Round us. Slow. One behind a stone, and another, and another, going round the camp in a ring, the way the dogs in the pub had come round the end of the bar.
Not dogs. Taller than dogs.
Skritch was awake. He didn’t say no. He didn’t say anything at all. He’d gone flat against the tree with his ear back, and his black eyes went round the ring, counting.
So did mine.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Six.
And the sixth one, when it came past the gap in the stones, had antlers.