Into the Woods
Alison
Alison scratched out a line in the second verse of her poem about the spriggan. It was one of the most important poems in her book, a real tale of life in Wilderise that she hoped would capture the imaginations of the audience of nobles that would arrive in just a few short days.
It had also been one of the hardest subjects to capture. Alison found it difficult to depict the incredible sense of awe she felt in the presence of something so powerful, so magical, so much bigger than the life she had lived before. Weyland’s illustration was miraculous, unfolding across two pages in a stunning depiction of the spriggan’s incredible feat in helping to raise the standing stones.
But her own words just weren’t doing it justice.
“Still not right?” asked Keir as he brought her a cup of tea and a freshly baked scone from the kitchen.
She shook her head. “I was hoping our encounter would have given me some inspiration, but I can’t seem to figure it out.”
“The wise old one, the spriggan, follows.” Keir read the scratched-out line. “That seems accurate to me.”
“Accurate, but not majestic,” said Alison. “I’ll get back to it later.” She stacked her papers together neatly on her desk and capped her pen. “Are you ready?”
“Almost,” he said. “The cake is in the kitchen. I’ll go get the horses and meet you at the gate.”
“Oh, you got the cake already? You didn’t say.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you at work,” he said. “It’s in the icebox.”
He was so thoughtful. He’d gotten her the icebox when he heard her say how much she missed having one, and now he’d gone to pick up Rinka’s welcome cake unprompted.
She could get used to this.
“Thank you,” Alison whispered to him. She kissed him on the cheek as she went into the kitchen to check out the cake.
The baker had done a magnificent job. The cream was pale pink and impossibly smooth, and the strawberries on the top were deep red and mouthwateringly plump, picked fresh that very morning from the baker’s own patch behind the store. It was very difficult to walk away without stealing one off the top.
But then, Keir had thought of that as well. There was a bowl of extra strawberries in the icebox as well, cleaned and ready to eat.
Gods, she loved him. She felt a little thrill at the thought. Would it be too much to say it to him right now?
“I’ll be right at the gate in ten minutes,” yelled Keir from the front room as the door closed behind him.
Her confession would have to wait. That was just as well. She had been waiting for the right moment for several weeks now, but it always seemed to slip away before she could work up the courage to speak. She had managed to steel her nerves once before, a couple of weeks earlier as they sat together on a beautiful candlelit evening. But her words had failed her, just as they’d failed her in writing the poem about the spriggan.
How could it be possible to capture a feeling so all-consuming into simple words?
Alison pondered the unfortunate circumstance of being a poet who couldn’t express how she felt with her language as she took a bite into one of the extra strawberries. It was exactly as delicious as it had looked: juicy, fragrant, and wonderfully sweet.
If the greatest of her problems was either figuring out how to tell the incredible man she loved that she loved him or finding a way to describe the magic of the extraordinary town she called home, she thought she must be doing some things right.
She changed into her riding attire and met Keir at the gate a few minutes later. He helped her into her saddle—her romantic notions of sharing a single horse had been squashed weeks earlier when Keir had gone to fetch the horses from Fossholm. He had explained to her that two people could not possibly share a saddle, and that the weight of them together would hurt the horse.
And then he had suggested that if she wanted to be close to him, she needn’t use the horse as an excuse. The memory of the encounter that followed set her heart racing as Keir climbed back into his saddle beside her.
“What’s that look?” he asked her.
“I was just remembering when you bought the horses,” she said.
The look he gave her told her he hadn’t forgotten either.
“What time is Rinka arriving again?” he asked, glancing back towards the cottage.
“Soon,” said Alison regretfully. She was excited to see her friend again, but she had to admit she wouldn’t have minded delaying the trip for a moment if they’d had the time.
Keir led them up the lane towards Herot’s Hollow. They traveled through the town, stopping to say hello to Gwenla, who was waiting at the post office for news of the arriving nobility. Then they followed the road along the river towards Fossholm, where they would meet Rinka when her carriage arrived a few hours later.
Alison had only taken the road to Fossholm a couple of times since she’d arrived in town. The town itself was about the same size as Herot’s Hollow, but it was much newer, having only come up around the time Weldan House, the residence of Lord Ainsley and Keir’s childhood home, was built. There were few businesses there that Herot’s Hollow did not also share, but Fossholm did have a small printing press that published the Hill Country Standard, and they had agreed to print a first run of Weyland and Alison’s poetry book as a pamphlet. With any luck, they’d make enough sales to raise the funds to cover the cost of binding in Sudport.
The road to Fossholm quickly entered the woods after they rounded the hill that concealed Herot’s Hollow from the view of the wider Hill Country. It was only a few miles between the towns, but it felt longer in the isolation of the forest. The woods were so wild there, it was hard to imagine there were two bustling villages so close by.
“Be on the lookout for fairy activity,” Alison reminded Keir.
“It feels absurd, listening for bells and looking for strange groups of mushrooms,” he said. “The fairies I’ve known have been like Aras: sensible, practical, and hard-working. If we’d heard it from anyone but him or the spriggan, I don’t know if I would have believed them.”
“I also thought the idea of a giant angry tree person was absurd until I met him,” said Alison.
“I still think that’s a little absurd,” said Keir.
Alison laughed. “It is, a little. But I’m still very glad to have met him.”
“Hopefully we feel the same about the fairies after we find them.”
Keir and Alison rode along in comfortable silence until they reached the turnoff to Weldan House. The forest opened, granting a view of the lane and the bridge over the river, the same river from the vine’s dreamworld that pulled Alison over the falls again and again.
The same river where Keir’s younger brother Danny had drowned years earlier.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m going to stop by once we’ve gotten Rinka settled,” said Keir. He slowed his horse to wait for Alison by the turnoff.
She came alongside, as close as her horse would let her, and took his hand. “Do you want me to come with you?” she asked.
“No. I need to do this alone. To have a conversation with him, man to man. It’s long overdue.”
Alison wished he could leave this place and all of the painful memories that came with it forever. That he could turn his back on his father for good, and that they could live out the rest of their lives in peace.
But Keir was born to be the duke of these lands, and over the past few weeks as he had begun to reintegrate into Herot’s Hollow, Alison had seen a side of him she hadn’t expected. A side of him that viewed his responsibility over the land as not a burden but an opportunity. A chance to do things better than his father had done.
Keir leaned to give Alison’s hand a kiss. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m ready for this. I’ll reach an understanding with him, one way or another. And then we can enjoy the summer’s festivities here together.”
“Enjoy them, and maybe ruin them a little.”
Keir chuckled. “Maybe it won’t have to come to that, although I would hate to disappoint Gwenla.”
They continued down the road towards Fossholm, at last reaching the bridge into town. From the bridge, the falls were visible at a distance.
Alison felt the lurch of her body forward and the terrible drop, the sensation of losing the ground beneath her and hurtling into the churning waters below as she looked.
The past times she had been here in the company of her friends, she had looked away, willing the memory away and attempting to focus on the road ahead of her.
But this time, she stopped her horse on the bridge. She let the memory continue: the sensation of drowning beneath the surface, of being pushed down by the water again and again. The burning of her lungs. The pain in her arms, reaching for something solid but coming up empty.
And then, something else. Something pulling her upwards. Tugging her towards dying light and healing air.
The euphoria of feeling the air rush back into her lungs. A hand on her back and the sputtering of water.
A voice, singing, on the breeze.
The sensations were so real, so present, that she had not heard Keir’s voice.
“Alison. Darling, are you alright?”
“What?” said Alison. She didn’t want to break free from the memory, but Keir’s voice had come like a hook, pulling her from it even as she fought to hold on.
He had gotten off his horse, and he was standing beside hers, reaching his hands around her waist to pull her down.
“I’m fine,” she said, but the words were unconvincing.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” said Keir.
“Keir, I’m okay. I was okay. Something saved me, at the very end.”
Alison stood next to Keir, leaning over the stone wall of the bridge and looking upstream to the spot at the bottom of the falls where it had happened. On the banks of the river, there was a dense thicket of reeds and rushes. Weaving into them was a little path that wound up to the road. A fisherman’s path, perhaps.
It felt familiar, though Alison knew she had never traveled it before.
“I’ve been here. There, on the banks. I can feel it.”
Keir’s face was white as a sheet. “Let’s get you inside,” he said. “This is some lingering effect of the magic. We need to find those fairies and set this right.”
Alison reached back out towards the bank, but the feeling had faded. She wanted to go over there, to see if there was something more to find.
But she looked at Keir, and she saw his fear and worry, and she turned away from it.
She allowed him to lead her and the horses into town. They hitched the horses at the stable and went into the inn for a light lunch of cucumber sandwiches, which they ate as they walked around the village, Keir’s watchful eyes never leaving Alison.
“Really, I’m alright,” she said. “Just a strange memory. Something I experienced in another world—of course it would leave a mark.”
“We have a few hours before Rinka gets here,” said Keir. “Why don’t we go look for the fairies while we wait? Aras said they gather in the woods to the south of town.”
Alison finished chewing her bite of sandwich—the cucumber was so wonderfully refreshing on this hot, sunny day—and answered. “Not quite so absurd now, hmm?”
“Maybe not,” admitted Keir. “Do you feel up for it? We could walk through the shops like we planned—”
“No,” said Alison. “I want to go.”
And so they walked through the town, keeping out of the way of the locals who were busy washing windows and tidying up planters in anticipation of the royal arrival.
The river fed into a broad lake that ran most of the length of town before feeding into another stream to the south. The road to Sudport followed the stream into a dense hardwood forest, and this was the road Alison and Keir took.
Alison did not see or hear any of the things Aras and the spriggan had told them to look out for, but after walking a mile or so from town, she did spot a little trail off the main road that led into the woods.
It was narrow, only wide enough for one person at a time, and the way the light filtered through the trees had the effect of a spotlight on the entrance.
It was deeply inviting.
“Where are you going?” asked Keir. Alison had begun to make her way to the trailhead.
“Isn’t this so lovely?” she said. “It seems to pull you in.”
“It’s not any of the things we were told to look for,” said Keir. “And yet…”
“It feels right, doesn’t it?”
Keir looked less certain, but he followed her nonetheless.
The path wound into the woods so perfectly, it felt as though it was put there just for them. Even the well-maintained roads they’d traveled earlier in the day had more obstacles to overcome—fallen logs to traverse, low-hanging branches to pull back—than the path, which seemed somewhat unnaturally clear. It was brighter than seemed reasonable too, considering how dense the woods that surrounded it were.
Alison couldn’t tell how long they had been walking. The light didn’t seem to move with the sun across the sky in this place. But before too long, they had reached what appeared to be the end: the entrance into a cave.
She turned to Keir. “What do you think?” she asked.
“I think we’d be insane to go in there.”
The cave entrance was framed by moss-covered boulders, the woods growing up and around it, concealing it from view even just a couple of steps from the path. The air coming up from it was cool and damp and smelled a bit like a summer night: jasmine and campfire.
Alison hadn’t doubted the path until this point. Aras had said something about fouler things lurking in the woods than fairies, although he did mention that happening at night, and it was definitely still daylight.
The cave didn’t feel sinister—in fact, it felt just as inviting as the path had. But that aroused Alison’s suspicions. There was something too perfect, too appealing about this place.
It could be the makings of something lovely and ancient and magical.
Or it could be a trap.
A breeze filtered through the trees around them, rustling the leaves and sending another sound through the air: bells.
It was unmistakable. The tinkling sound of tiny bells, pure and clear like water.
Keir snapped his head towards Alison. “Do you hear that?”
Alison nodded, and she led them into the cave.