xl. In which Arthur has a re but also, unfortunately, wood sickness
Arthur ached. His neck was throbbing—dully, but the throbbing had escaped containment. His chest throbbed, too. And his stomach.
And his ankle. And, well, his whole body.
Nice to know he was alive enough to feel pain. He hadn’t been sure when the bear grabbed him that it wasn’t the end. And it
was a dull pain, not the sharp stab it had been when the bear’s claws raked across him. That was something.
He shivered. The pain spiked. He was wrapped in furs, but the cold he remembered from before—the cold that had frozen the
blood oozing from his chest and stomach—was bone-deep now. Something heavy and warm rumbled on his chest. He hoped it would
warm him up.
Now there was a voice. Rather, the voice had been there, but he’d been too busy picking out feelings to notice. The voice
rose to the forefront, soft and soothing and achingly familiar.
“. . . and this door opened in the wall, and Odette found that secret room of Mrs. Wellsley’s. You remember I told you about
the secret room the other week. Anyway, Odette found it, but we don’t know what’s in it yet.”
Her radio program. Charlotte was recounting the latest development in her radio program, no different than if they’d been at home on a Saturday morning, drinking coffee and swapping stories. Arthur’s mouth curled into a smile, or tried to.
“Of course that was Friday. If we don’t get out of here soon, I’ll miss the next episode. Not that worse things aren’t likely
to befall us.”
When she paused, he imagined her sitting across from him at the kitchen table, taking a sip of her coffee.
“Still,” she said. “I’ll hate to miss it. What if they finally reveal Mrs. Wellsley’s secret? I won’t know a thing about it
until the following week, and by then I’m sure I’ll have lost the plot entirely.”
Arthur wriggled his fingers. They were so stiff he wasn’t sure they’d moved.
Her breath hitched. “Arthur?”
He tried again.
She clutched his hand. “I’m here.”
He opened his eyes.
Everything was blurry, of course; he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He wasn’t sure where he was. Not where he had been. The canopy
blurred darkly overhead, but around him glowed firelight.
And at his side was his sister.
“Lottie,” he croaked.
She squeezed his hand. He struggled to sit up. The rumbly thing on his chest mrowred disapprovingly and hopped off him. Freya. She arched into Arthur’s hand before trotting off to curl up beside the fire.
Charlotte helped him sit up and slid his glasses onto his face.
Her features leaped into focus. She looked so like she had when he’d left the house that he could’ve cried.
Then he saw Calyx piled behind her.
Arthur jerked away. Pain jolted through him. “What’s it—has it hurt you? Are you—”
A lazy tendril unfurled in his direction.
“It’s all right,” Charlotte said. “I know what happened. But Calyx has been a great help to me, and it’s not going to hurt
you—is it?” she asked the plant creature, in much the same tone she always told the cat to get off the table.
The tendril waved from side to side. Arthur still remembered leaves sealed over his face, vines biting into his ribs, tendrils
down his throat.
“Are you . . . quite sure?”
Faint clicking, which did not raise his confidence.
“Calyx.” The clicking died away. “Yes, I’m sure.”
The tendril stretched toward him. Nervously, Arthur let it wrap around his finger.
“Bygones? I’ll forget the whole thing if you will.”
The tendril shook his finger and retreated. Arthur let out an astonished chuckle and started coughing.
“You’re here,” he rasped, when the coughing had died away. “You’ve got eldritch creatures eating out of your hand. Of course
you have.” He prodded her shoulder, reassuring himself she was real and unharmed. “You’re not hurt?”
She laughed wetly. “Heaven’s sakes, Arthur. Half your torso is being held together by stitches and bandages, and you want
to know if I’m hurt?”
“Are you?”
“Of course not. I didn’t get mauled half to death by a bear.”
“And the children?”
“They’re fine. More or less.” She kissed his knuckles. “Seeing you get torn to bits didn’t do them any favors, but they’re
not hurt.”
Letting out a breath, Arthur leaned against her, careful to avoid squashing any of Calyx’s appendages.
Charlotte wrapped her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulder.
Knowing she’d come after him had been one thing; finding her sitting beside him, taking care of him as she always had, was quite another.
His eyes prickled. “I’ve missed you so much. I can’t believe you’re here.”
“Thank God I am.” Charlotte’s voice wobbled. “Ira was panicking so badly he couldn’t have done anything for you himself. Jonas
had to do the stitches, my hands were so stiff by the time we reached you, but I was able to talk them through it all right.”
Arthur’s stomach dipped. “Ira . . . Is he here?”
“Mmm.”
She let go of him. He wished she hadn’t. They had things to talk about, and he didn’t want to talk about them. Easier to go
on leaning against each other, glad to be sitting together.
“Let me see your bandages,” Charlotte said.
He tugged the furs from his shoulders, shivering so violently his teeth chattered. His father’s acorn hung from his neck.
He touched it, relieved. He’d dropped it at some point in the confusion with the bear.
His bandages were tidy but spotted with blood. Charlotte peeled them away to replace them.
Arthur sucked in a breath and started coughing. Black veins crept across his torso from the gouges the bear had left. Coughing
made his injuries throb worse than ever, but he couldn’t stop for several moments.
Charlotte’s jaw tightened, but when she spoke it was in the same calm, soothing tone she used on all her patients. “It’s not
as bad as it could be. The acorn’s slowed the spread. I wish . . . I found a cure for it. The sickness.”
“You did?” Arthur wheezed. “Then—”
“I don’t have any more.” Charlotte fiddled with John’s wedding ring—or Arthur thought so, before realizing she was fiddling with a silver acorn, hanging beside the ring, that matched his own.
“There’s this woman I’ve been traveling with.
She had the sickness. We tested the cure on her, and it worked.
But we used it all up, and I haven’t . . . It’s the acorns, but—”
She gestured around them. They were in a grove of young silver oaks. There was no black ooze, no half-skeletal animals, no
unnatural silence—but all the trees were tarnished, none fruiting.
“Ira thinks replanting the heart of the wood will cure you, too, but we have to get there first.”
Arthur let the mention of Ira go by without comment. He wanted to see him—wanted to deal with the way they’d left things—but
first, he wanted more time with his sister.
He fished around in his pocket for the rowan cross, handed it to her. Her breath caught.
“It did keep me safe,” Arthur said, and he told her about the fog.
She turned the cross over and over in her fingers, eyes bright. “I suppose we’ll never know why Dad had this.”
Arthur smiled crookedly. “I think there’s a lot we’ll never know. Why he didn’t tell us he was friends with the Lord of the
Wood. Or what he’d think of—”
He broke off, skin prickling. He hated feeling so uncertain of the one person who had always been there for him. Mrs. Young’s
single, angry word echoed in his head; Arthur knew what Seacliff would think. But he wouldn’t care what they thought, if only
Charlotte understood.
Her eyes flickered over him. “What he’d think of you and Ira?”
Arthur’s stomach clenched. His palms were clammy.
“You know?”
She gave a small smile. “It’s the way he talks about you. And . . . it explains a lot. About you. You were always so lukewarm on courtship, no matter how much you dreamed of romance.”
She didn’t sound angry, or disgusted, and there was that small smile, but Arthur’s mouth was dry.
“And . . . you’re not . . . you don’t . . .”
Charlotte chewed her thumbnail. Like Jonas’s lip picking, the nail chewing had been a nervous habit for a long time, but Charlotte
had grown out of it two decades ago.
Arthur tugged her hand from her mouth. “What is it?”
“I loved John,” she blurted.
“I know,” Arthur said in confusion.
“I still do.” Charlotte fiddled with John’s ring. “But I’m . . . I’ve always . . .” She cleared her throat. “Elspeth . . .
the woman I’ve been traveling with. The way it is between us . . . It’s like how it is with you and him.”
Arthur’s heart stuttered. He’d always thought them so different, he and Charlotte, but here they shared one thing that seemed
rather important.
“I’ve always known,” she said tightly. “I’ve always . . . admired other women that way.”
Arthur wrapped his arms around her. She relaxed.
“I never knew,” he said, “until him. Where . . . where is he?”
She helped him to his feet. “I should warn you. I don’t know what he looked like when he left you, but . . .”
Arthur’s legs wobbled, and he was half bent over, but he could stand. Sort of. Charlotte handed him her cane; Calyx supported
her. She seemed perfectly comfortable with it, and bygones were bygones and all that, but Arthur wouldn’t be anything like
comfortable with Calyx for some time.
Charlotte nodded to their left. Clinging to the furs, Arthur peered through the trees.
Sasha and Jonas ran back and forth, kicking leaves at each other. A beast with a scarred eye and a twisted leg slunk between them, growling. He had a wolf’s tail now, too, Arthur noticed with a pang. Moss and lichens grew more thickly over his scar and in the ruff of his neck than ever.
Sasha whacked the beast in the side with a stick. With a pained howl, he fell to the ground. She threw the stick down and
jumped on him, tickling him as he pretended to die a slow, dramatic death.
Arthur’s heart fluttered. Ira was playing with the children.
“I can’t say I cared for him at first,” Charlotte murmured, “but he’s not so bad.”
Arthur didn’t respond. His skin buzzed, his ears rang, and he wanted nothing more than to run to Ira and hold him.
But he was being held together by stitches and bandages. He was mostly standing because of Charlotte’s cane. And he wasn’t