i. In which Arthur tells a bedtime story #3
“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.”
“I knew it,” 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 her grandfather 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.
“He nursed your granddad back to health,” he continued, “and when Granddad was well, the Lord of the Wood turned back into a stag and led him safely out of the wood, giving him a silver acorn to remember him by—the one that’s hanging in my workshop to this day.
Granddad never saw the Lord of the Wood again, but he never forgot him.
And when he returned to Seacliff years later, he didn’t get lost once. ”
“Wow.” Sasha turned onto her side, dark eyes sparkling. “Do you think I’ll ever meet the Lord of the Wood? Do you think he’d like
me?”
With a pang, Arthur remembered asking his father that so many years ago. He swallowed the memory and smiled.
“Certainly he’d like you, duck.” He leaned over her, trying to look menacing. “But to meet him, you know . . . you’d have
to enter the forest.”
Sasha popped upright, narrowly avoiding beaning him in the nose with her forehead. “I’m not afraid!”
“You should be,” Arthur said solemnly, “because in the forest there are . . . tickle monsters,” and he grabbed her and tickled her until they were both breathless with laughter.
“Arthur.”
They sat up guiltily, the laughter dying on their faces. Charlotte stood in the doorway, eyes bruised with exhaustion.
“Bed. Now.”
“But Mama—”
“Now.”
Even Sasha knew better than to argue with that tone, so she wriggled farther into her quilt silently (if grumpily), frowning
when her uncle and mother kissed her forehead. When both children had been attended to and the light turned out, Charlotte
and Arthur retreated to the hall, closing the door behind them.