Chapter Four
CHAPTER FOUR
Maple growled, hackles raised as she stared into the brush behind Liam, an uncharacteristic harshness in her demeanor. He turned, and found himself facing the barrel of a rifle. Its wielder stared at him with an intensity that made Liam take a step back. The world swam around him as he struggled to make sense of what he saw.
“Grab the dog,” the man demanded.
“Maple, come here,” Liam called. Despite the tremble in his voice, she obeyed. With a silent gratitude he grabbed her collar, pulling her close and keeping her there. She growled again at the strangers, but did not struggle against his grip.
“What’s a squirrelly thing like you doing out here?” the man asked. “Not a lot of folks find their way this deep into the forest.”
Liam opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come. His heart pounded in his ears, his hands shaking on Maple’s collar. He kept his eyes trained squarely on the gun in front of him. The men stood not fifteen feet away, near the base of the towering maple.
“Better make sure the boy doesn’t see anything, don’t you think, Andrew?” the man with the gun said, indicating his buddy with a tilt of his jaw .
“Don’t taunt him, Jimmy, it’s not worth our time,” a dark-haired man, Andrew, replied from his place by the tree.
“Oh come on, he looks like he’ll piss himself.” Jimmy snickered, and then stepped forward, closing the gap between him and Liam. Maple growled at the stranger, but Liam tugged on the collar, begging her not to react. Jimmy raised an arm, and Liam swallowed, preparing for a strike that did not come.
Instead, the glasses were ripped from his face, and tossed unceremoniously into the grass in the distance.
Liam’s world descended into blurry chaos.
Jimmy took a of steps back, the details of his face lost to Liam.
“I—I just got here—I haven’t seen a thing.” Liam’s voice shook. The man with the gun was nothing more than a fuzzy outline standing in among the trees.
“Yeah, I bet you can’t now,” Andrew said gruffly, then someone else burst into horrible laughter.
Liam was frozen in place, shaking. It never got easier, being vulnerable. Being weak.
Something moved in the background of the forest, but Liam couldn’t make out what it was. His attention was diverted when he heard Jimmy step forward.
“A word of advice, son. If you’re gonna be out this time of year, best to be wearing some orange—wouldn’t want some poor hunters mistaking that dog for a doe, now would we?” Jimmy taunted. Liam heard the gun cock as the man approached. He looked around for his glasses, but it was no use. The brown frames would blend into the dirt and the grass too well, and unless he got on hands and knees to feel for them, they were as good as gone. There was nothing he could do but stand there, powerless, and wait for these strangers to kill his dog.
“Jimmy—” Andrew called, moving towards them, but it was too late. Jimmy was too far ahead, too close to where Liam and Maple stood.
Then, impossibly, the man tripped. He swore loudly as he fell, and the gun went off—a stray bullet discharged into the forest.
Liam let out a panicked, incoherent cry. Maple, spooked by the gunshot, broke free of his grip and bolted off into the woods .
The blurry figure of the man stood, muttering curses to himself. The others stepped forward, moving to help him up, but he brushed them off. Liam squinted, trying to get a look at the man, but it was no use.
“I’m fine,” Jimmy spat, picking himself up off the ground.
Andrew approached and came into better focus—the dark hair, the tough work-hardened features. He gave Liam a look so withering he felt himself physically shrink. Then an awful smirk crept across Andrew’s face, and he shoved Liam into the dirt. Liam landed hard, the impact knocking the air from his lung. Ice cold mud seeped into his clothes, and the clearing swirled around him.
“I’m feeling generous today,” Andrew said coolly. “I see you or that dog again though, and you’re toast. Stay out of the way of me and my crew and we won’t have a problem.”
“Y-yeah okay,” Liam stuttered, trying desperately to regain control over his breathing.
“Let’s go, Andrew, if we wanna get back before dark,” a tentative voice said. It seemed Andrew was the one in charge.
“Yeah, Sean, don’t worry yourself. I just want to get our friend here’s name,” Andrew said. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Liam,” he said.
“Liam…?”
“Liam Wesley.”
“Pleasure to meet ya, Liam Wesley. Hope we don’t meet again, for your sake.”
Andrew dug the tip of his steel-toed work boots into the mud and kicked hard. Again Liam braced for the blow, but instead icy mud splattered across his face. He winced.
With that, the men departed, their blurry figures moving through the tress. Liam couldn’t tell which way they were heading—only that it was away from the house and the direction Maple had ran.
Liam rolled over onto all fours, searching through the wet grass for his glasses. Water soaked through the knees of his pants, cold and biting. He wouldn’t be able to find his way back to the trail without them, let alone find Maple and make sure she was safe. His hands shook with residual fear and cold as they combed through the grass and the mud. He had no idea where the men had thrown them… it could take him ages.
More movement in the clearing drew his attention, and he flinched. But as the shape moved closer, he recognized the blurred figure of a woman standing before him. He couldn’t pick out the details, only her silhouette surrounded by bright red hair that blew in the breeze. A hand stretched towards him, and his glasses sat upon her open palm.
“Thanks,” he muttered, taking them gratefully and shoving them back into place.
When he looked up, the woman was gone.
***
Iona cursed silently to herself—she wasn’t meant to interfere.
If the man tripped over the roots of her tree, perhaps he should have watched more closely. And if those roots had not been there a moment prior, well… It went against everything she’d ever been told about the humans, but how could she not? To stand there and watch without doing anything was not in her nature. All she’d done was encourage a bit of root growth, directly in the path of Jimmy’s foot.
True, handing the boy his glasses went a bit over the line. He had seen her, even if his eyesight was so poor he might not recognize her if he saw her again, or even know she wasn’t human. He would not have known what she was.
To see him so vulnerable—it felt like an intrusion, of some sort. In fact, Iona had every intention to leave, as soon as she was sure he lived. To leave him blind and fumbling would be most cruel and while the Acernae were many things, they were not cruel. None of her kin would blame her.
Now that she had meddled in business that was not hers, how far would she go?
Iona hesitated.
Finding the dog and making sure she was unharmed was certainly not an overstep on her part. How easy it would be for the poor thing to get lost in these unfamiliar forests! No, better for Iona to go and guide her home; She knew where the boy lived and could get the dog there safely.
But something else nagged at her .
She hadn’t noticed the men were armed before. Some men did venture out into her forests to hunt deer, and other small critters in the autumn season. But these men weren’t dressed like hunters, who tried to blend in with the surroundings—they wore black. Furthermore, what reason could they have to threaten the innocent boy, when he had done nothing? They were hiding something.
Iona trailed the men, unseen, but watching. They weren’t far from the clearing, where the boy was still picking himself back up.
Andrew, was yelling at the man with the gun.
“That was reckless, Jimmy. It’s one thing to threaten the kid, to try to kill his dog? You’re lucky the bullet didn’t hit him. Already bad enough drawing attention to ourselves like that. Shooting him could land us in real deep shit.”
“I only wanted to prove the point, boss,” Jimmy argued.
“I can’t tell where we are on this map anymore. The trails are too overgrown,” the man in the back complained.
“Give me that, Sean, you’ve always been shit with the maps,” Jimmy replied. The smell of stale beer drifted towards Iona as he spoke. He ripped the map out of Sean’s hands and studied it, tilting it this way and that in an attempt to orient himself.
“I think this is private property, now. We’re off the fed land,” he proclaimed a moment later.
“That means it’s fair game, right?” Sean asked.
“No, not necessarily. I’ll have to track down who owns it. It could be an easy score, though, if it belongs to the kid — he won’t give us any trouble. Plenty of untouched wood out here.”
Iona shifted, double checking to make sure they couldn’t see her. She wasn’t sure what the words meant, but the sickening feeling grew stronger as they trudged on. Iona drifted forward, looking over Sean’s shoulder at the map they carried.
It was marked with symbols Iona did not recognize. The men’s path was charted though, denoting the way they’d arrived through the protected lands. She made a mental note of that path, memorizing its location. It wasn’t far from where she’d spotted them the prior evening—a bit beyond the borders of her forest, but still where she could reach. She spared a quick thought for the boy and his dog, before stepping through the forest to the location she’d seen on the map .
When she arrived in the stand of trees, her breath caught.
Stumps of centuries old tress surrounded her. A hundred or more, stretching out for fifty yards in all directions.
The earth beneath her feet had been churned by the tracks of heavy machinery—logging equipment, used to haul away the lumber once harvested. The ferns and shrubs were trampled underneath, left strangled and withering where they grew. Her heart ached with their suffering, the loss cutting through her like a knife.
On the base of each of the stumps, the remnants of orange spray paint dripped down the bark.
Anger welled up in her. The men scouting her forest weren’t harmless visitors—they were looking to harvest her trees.
And, if what she’d overheard had been any indication, they were likely doing it against the will of the humans who cared for the forests. It had been nearly a century since their forests had been harvested so brutally, since they’d been placed under the care of the human government. And yet…
Iona steeled herself, pushing aside the flurry of emotions that threatened to overwhelm her. There were innocent beings in her forest that needed her help.
***
Iona closed her eyes, and listened through the eyes and ears of the trees.
The dog was easy enough to find. She had bolted in the direction of the house, moving away from the gun as it fired, but quickly lost her course.
Iona stepped through to the dog, and took her physical form before approaching to avoid scaring her. Her boots sunk into the soft muddy trail, but her footsteps were quiet.
Maple, the dog was called. Iona smiled, in spite of herself. The gesture spoke more to the character of the boy, whose name Iona did not know.
“Hi, sweet girl,” she said to the dog, who slowed and stilled at the sound. Maple cocked her head to the side, looking uncertain. Iona was not as skilled with the fauna of the forests as her summer kin, but her magic sang in the air, willing the dog to calm, and to trust.
Slowly, cautiously, the dog stepped closer, sniffing at the air .
Iona figured she must smell quite strange to an animal that hadn’t encountered her kind before. She crouched down to Maple’s eye level and extended a gentle hand. The dog approach and Iona couldn’t resist a smile at the way the dog’s whiskers brushed against her palm.
“It’s okay, you’re safe with me.” She kept her voice low and soothing, and Maple relented, stepping forward further to allow Iona to pat the top of her head. “Come, I’ll lead you home.”
And so the two set off towards the cabin.
But the felled trees kept nagging at her as they walked. There had been something suspicious about those men. They’d been felling trees just outside of her forest for months and none of her kin had known. The Acernae had retreated so tightly among themselves they no longer felt responsible for the world beyond. Iona scowled. How could she let the others dismiss her fears so easily, when they’d all but been confirmed in what she saw? The men were marking the trees for the slaughter, with their spray paint.
Her fears were only confirmed by the way the men treated the boy. They did not seem the sort to back down easily, and though their guns could not harm the Acernae, if the trees their spirits were bound to fell, the spirit would die. She shuddered to think how horrible it would be. There was little her people could do to push back against their threat without the strength of their numbers.
It was the Acernae’s purpose to fight for the forests they protected, but the humans had evolved over the centuries. Their technologies had advanced, too. The gifts Iona and her people were given no longer troubled the humans who threatened to invade them. Her little trick with the tree roots may have deterred the man from whatever foul thing he’d intended to do, but it would not stop him and his crew for long.
The trees they’d marked with orange blazes represented hundreds of years of life in the valley, snuffed out in a matter of days. And something told her this was only the beginning.
As Iona and Maple reached the cabin, she realized it might be a while before the boy returned if he thought the dog was still loose in the wild. She scanned the forest, not sensing him in the immediate area, and looked back down at the dog. Soon the forest would be too dark for the boy to navigate with his human senses, not to mention he was likely freezing. He’d have to come home soon.
“Well, the door is locked so I guess we’ll just wait here?” she asked.
Maple stared up at her, tail wagging. Then the dog settled, curling up on a blanket spread on the wooden deck. It felt wrong, to leave the dog unattended after such an eventful day, though Maple had calmed as soon as the house had come into view. It was really better for Iona to leave, to attend to her duties in the forest and leave the boy to his.
Instead, she sat in the rickety chair that looked out into the forest beyond. She imagined generations of human inhabitants sitting there as she did now, admiring the foliage of the fall when the leaves of the maples changed colors. A small garden lay just beyond the porch, wooden planters neatly sectioned out in rows. Long since abandoned plants withered within, untended, giving their energy back to the earth.
It was a quaint house, one Iona had not seen since the boy was a child. It hadn’t changed much since then. The wooden exterior looked mildly worse for wear, but the bones of it remained strong. Moss and lichen covered the roof just as they hung about the trunk and limbs of her tree. Although the cabin had been built by men, it was now just as much a part of the forest as she and her kin.
She put a hand to the wooden wall and smiled at the magic that licked against her palm. Wood held the impression of powerful emotions, and the house had left many cherished and joyous memories behind in its walls. The humans who lived within this house had been a kind and gentle type. They lived in a harmony with the forests when most others did not.
An idea struck her—one that might mean the solution to their little predicament. Of course, it would mean breaking every rule in the book.
Better to try now, though, than to wait until the situation got desperate. That’s what she told herself, anyway.