xxxix. In which Arthur has an encounter with a bear
Arthur and the children straggled onward. Despite the acorn, he thought they might be going the wrong way. Ever more trees
dripped with black ooze as they passed. The few animals they saw showed skulls, ribs, and pelvises through their skin.
Jonas pressed so close to him it became hard to walk. Freya rubbed against their legs over and over, mewling. Sasha, quiet,
clung to Maurice’s neck. The gelding’s pace slowed until he was almost creeping. With his size, it would have been funny, if the forest hadn’t crawled with unease. If the forest hadn’t been so silent.
It was a wintry silence, cold and muted as if a foot of snow had been on the ground, though it wasn’t. Branches encased in
ice looked like glass. Frosted leaves crunched underfoot.
“Look,” Jonas whispered.
All around them were trees like those in the vale. Twisted into human shapes. Arthur shuddered away from them, picturing Charlotte’s
face in a gnarled trunk.
She wasn’t a tree, he told himself. She was fine. Wherever she was.
The anthropoid trees made it harder to believe.
“Who are they?” Sasha whispered.
“No one, duck,” Arthur said, though he knew otherwise. “They’re just trees.”
“They’re not shaped like proper trees,” Jonas said.
The iced-over branches stuck up at odd angles, like arms raised in terror. Knots and cavities gaped like eyes and mouths.
Roots thrust up as if all the trees had been frozen in the midst of fleeing some disaster. Half-dead birds, translucent and
skeletal, whistled thinly from branches. Other birds, entirely dead, littered the leaf mold.
Arthur shivered, clutching Jonas’s hand and walking so close to Maurice that he kept bumping into him.
Perhaps the forest had had a reason for preventing them from coming this way.
The human trees persisted. They ought to have heeded the forest, Arthur thought, and not gone so persistently northward, but
he wasn’t sure they could’ve reached the heart of the wood otherwise.
He wasn’t sure they’d reach it in this case, either. He couldn’t stop imagining them turning into trees themselves and wished,
for the first time, that the children weren’t with him. Pointless, that. He couldn’t have sent them home through the forest
alone. They were here, and that was that.
The ice kept the black ooze from spreading. That was his only comfort.
“Who’s that?” Jonas asked suddenly.
“Who’s—”
A boy. Overgrown with moss, his skin and clothes hardening into bark. And Arthur recognized him.
The boy from the work camp.
The back of his head melded into a trunk.
His hair had transformed into the thin, threadlike roots of a parasitic vine.
His face was human, throat and chin and nose and forehead skin instead of bark, but veined in black.
Crystalline ice feathered across his features, clinging to his eyebrows and lashes.
His lips were blue with cold, his eyes horribly open but so fogged with ice it was as if he had grown cataracts.
Arthur had saved the boy from Ira only for him to suffer this fate instead. “Oh, no.”
“Who is he, Uncle Arthur?” Jonas repeated.
“A woodsman.” Arthur drew closer. “I’d hoped he’d gotten away.”
The boy was dead. He must have been. Surely he could not have grown so cold as to turn blue and survived.
But behind their icy film, his eyes shifted minutely.
“Hello?” Arthur wished he knew the boy’s name. “Are you . . . Can you . . . Can you hear me?”
The boy’s mouth opened, barely. He let out a sound that might have been an attempt at words.
Arthur touched the acorn at his throat. Perhaps it could stop the boy’s growth as it had Ira’s. But it hadn’t reversed Ira’s
growth, and the boy seemed too far gone for anything less.
Arthur unclasped the acorn’s chain nonetheless, but the boy’s lips moved. His paltry breath fogged the air. Arthur stepped
closer, straining to listen.
“What?”
The boy’s lips formed a word so quietly Arthur might have imagined it.
“Run.”
Something crashed through the underbrush behind them. Its roar shook ice from the trees with a tinkling like broken glass.
Arthur stepped back, shielding the children. “Oh—”
It was a bear. Arthur had never seen one, except in books or ancient carvings.
But there it was, towering over him on its hind legs, far larger than he’d imagined a bear could be.
Half its skull, its vertebrae, and one scapula were visible through its skin.
Black ooze dripped from its eyes, as if it had been blinded.
If it couldn’t see them, it could smell them. It stopped, rearing to sniff the air—God Almighty, it was twelve feet tall—then
lowered and shambled toward them. Freya darted away through the trees.
“Run,” Arthur said to Jonas, nudging them behind him. “Run!”
Jonas froze, unable to do anything more than cling to his hand. Arthur flung them toward Maurice. His back spasmed horribly,
but he shoved Jonas onto the gelding’s back.
“Get them out of here.”
Maurice snorted and whirled around, but Sasha hurtled off of him.
“Uncle Arthur!”
Before Arthur could stop her, she’d run past, waving a stick and hollering. The bear ambled closer in utter disregard for
her weapon. The boy in the tree closed his eyes exhaustedly as more bark solidified at his throat and chin.
A rock hit the bear in the face. Jonas, dismounted and trembling but already armed with another. Roaring, the bear changed
direction. Sasha chased it, beating it with her stick and shouting, “Don’t! Hurt! My! Sibling!”
Desperate, Arthur hurled a stone at the bear and dodged as it came toward him. He grabbed Sasha around the waist and threw
her at Jonas.
“Go, now!”
Maurice screamed but circled the children, shaking his mane as if to encourage them to grab on. Arthur broke away, throwing
more rocks and silently praying he’d find the children if he lost them.
“Go!”
Then he stopped worrying about whether they were listening, because the bear reared right over him.
He didn’t even have a stick to beat it off. All he had was a single remaining stone, which seemed more likely, at this point,
to anger the creature.
Dropping to all fours, the bear snuffled his shirt. Its breath scorched his skin. He swallowed.
With another roar, the bear lunged at him. He yeeted the stone at it, uselessly, and tried to dive aside—too late.
Claws raked across his chest and stomach. The children screamed. His fingers scraped in the leaf mold for another stone, a
stick, anything with which to defend himself, but all he could do was throw a fistful of wet, dirty leaves at the creature.
He didn’t know where the acorn had gone.
The bear grabbed his ankle with its massive jaws, whipped its head around, and threw him into a tree. He gasped, winded. Blood
trickled from his chest, his stomach, his ankle. His clothes were shredded and filthy, his glasses askew, the children were
screaming and throwing rocks, bark had grown up the boy in the tree’s face until all that was visible was one dead eye.
In the distance, a stag bugled. The bear turned from Arthur with one paw raised over him, confused. Black ooze dripped from
its eye onto his torn chest.
Arthur turned his head, barely, blearily. The fluffy shape of a cat leaped over a fallen log and sped toward the children.
The last thing he saw, before he lost consciousness, was the blurry form of a stag bounding after her.