Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
After an hour of trampling through the wooded grove, Liam accepted defeat.
He’d shouted himself hoarse calling for Maple. In a forest that stretched out for miles in either direction, she could have gone anywhere.
His adrenaline faded after the confrontation. Once he’d gotten over his initial fear the men were still lurking in the forest, the harshness of the cool autumn had taken its toll. Rain had soaked through his waterproof jacket, rendered useless after hours in the drizzle. His waterlogged boots squelched with each step, and his toes had long since gone numb.
Worse was the knowledge that he had failed—that his sweet girl was out there, scared and alone. Not to mention night was falling soon.
And yet, when he arrived back at the cabin, Maple was waiting for him on the wooden porch. He sighed with his relief. The day had taken such a strange and terrible turn it was a small wonder she was sitting there, unharmed. She perked up, lifting her head as Liam stepped out of the brush.
But when he saw the woman sitting on the rocking chair next to his dog, his breath caught. Bright red hair framed her delicate features .
“You were in the clearing,” he said, his voice raw and low.
She nodded, then opened her mouth as if to speak—and closed it again. Her delicate lips pursed.
“Yes, I was,” she said simply. Her voice was soft, tinged with something that felt an awful lot like sympathy.
She was beautiful, in an ethereal sort of way. Her vivid hair caught his attention first, but then he noticed the neat little horns that peeked out from just above her temples, and his eyes went wide. They were rough and brown, as if made of bark, shaped like goat horns. No more than two or three inches long, they spiraled back along her scalp. Liam wiped at his glasses, worried that the rain collected on them was warping his vision—but the horns remained. And then he saw the pointed shape of her ears.
It wasn’t possible. He swayed, the exhaustion and the fatigue winning out. That’s why he was seeing such outlandish things—he needed to lie down.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, his voice faltering. “I’ve had a rough day.”
Liam’s eyes closed and the world tipped forward. The woman’s lithe arms caught him helped steady him, ushering him up the steps of the porch. He stepped out of her hold, bracing himself on the door frame and turning from her to hide his embarrassment.
“You’re bleeding,” the woman gasped, staring down at his thigh.
“Oh.” He followed her gaze and saw the clean tear in his pant leg, blood seeping into the fabric.
“Maybe we should get you inside,” she suggested.
Liam hummed his affirmation and dug in his pockets for the small keyring to open the door.
Maple trotted in first, excited to be back in the warm house and promptly curled up by the dying fire. Liam followed, only then noticing the sharp pain on his right thigh with each step. The cold and adrenaline had done wonders in preventing him from feeling it earlier, but know he’d noticed it the pain was worse than he’d realized. He sat down heavily on the old couch and carefully pulled off his muddy boots, setting them near Maple and the fireplace. Then he straightened the leg gingerly, and rest his ankle on the coffee table to look at the wound .
The woman hung back near the door, uncertainty clouding her features. He turned his attention back on her, and was again struck by the little horns poking out from her hair.
“What—” he started, but the words died in his throat. There were too many questions he wanted to ask. But if it was some strange quirk of hers, it seemed rude to comment—especially since she helped him in the clearing and brought back his dog. And, after the day he’d had, he was in desperate need of a friendly face. Let her tell him when she was ready, he decided.
“I’m Liam,” he said instead. “Thanks for bringing Maple home.”
“I am Iona,” she replied.
“Iona,” he repeated dumbly. It was an odd name, but it had a pleasant sound to it.
She wasn’t dressed for the weather, he noticed. A light green dress hung off her delicate frame, woven from thick natural fibers, with a heavy sweater thrown over it. Simple leather boots covered her feet, looking unaffected by the rain and the mud.
“Can I… help you with that? It seems to still be bleeding.”
Liam wanted to refuse, but she was right that the bleeding hadn’t stopped. His stomach twisted at the thought of asking this stranger for more help, but he pushed the feeling aside. His pride was long gone, anyway, if she had seen him back in the clearing.
“There’s a first aid kit, in the closet over there.” He gestured to it.
The woman nodded, and sprung to action. Liam watched curiously as she went. Her movements were slow and precise, and she held herself tall. She walked with the grace of a ballet dancer.
Before she returned, Liam inspected the wound. A clean line sliced through the leg of his tan pants, matching the shallow cut beneath. It was not as deep as he’d feared, but his lips twisted into a frown. The bullet must have skimmed his leg after all. At least it wouldn’t require stitches.
A moment later Iona returned. She set the first aid kit down on the coffee table and perched herself on the edge of the couch to examine its contents.
“I am unfamiliar with these things,” she confessed with a helpless look. “You’ll have to walk me though it. ”
“First we have to clean it. Grab the gauze, and that little brown bottle there.”
She poured the alcohol into the gauze as instructed, then dabbed at the shallow cut. It stung on contact, and Liam couldn’t hold back the wince. Iona snatched the gauze back, looking concerned, but he waved her on.
“It just hurts, it’s alright,” he assured her.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah I’m sure.”
She studied him a moment longer, then resumed her efforts. Her eyes, now focused on the wound in his thigh, were the most brilliant green—unlike anything Liam had seen before. The strangeness of her appearance was a helpful distraction. He sucked in another breath as Iona worked.
“Those men, in the clearing… I’ve been watching them the past few days. They’re rather nasty,” she murmured after a moment. “I am sorry they caused you trouble today.”
He let his head fall back against the soft couch. “It’s not your fault.” He let his eyes close, and grit his teeth against the pain.
Then mercifully, it stopped.
“Now what?” she asked.
“There’s an ointment in there somewhere, then more gauze on top.”
After a moment Iona dug out what she was searching for. Certainly it was work that Liam could do himself, letting her do it for him felt rather indulgent. He told himself that in his exhaustion, small indulgences could be forgiven. Tending to it himself might only make the wound worse.
Iona pulled out more gauze, and laid it over the wound. Then she dug back through the first aid kit, and found a wrapping to hold the gauze in place. She was quiet for a moment as she secured the dressing. Then she spoke, so softy that Liam had to strain to make out the words.
“Surely my appearance is strange to you, and yet you have not asked.”
“I… uh, thought it would be rude,” he confessed .
She smiled at him, now finished with her task, and set the things she’d used back in the first aid kit. She pulled the blanket over him and sat down onto the couch, keeping a careful space between them.
“I am not human, Liam. Though I may look like you, there are some rather obvious differences.”
Liam couldn’t help the startled laugh that escaped him. “I just hit my head or something, I’m exhausted. That’s all.”
“It is true, and I think you know it.” Iona looked sweetly at him, as if she knew what she told him was difficult to believe. “You have grown up in these forests, you know that they are quite special. We are only one unique aspect. I am, like my kin, a guardian to the life within the bounds of our wild lands. We call ourselves Acernae, and we are bound to the oldest and most powerful of the maple trees in the valley.”
“That’s not possible,” he told her. “I’m a scientist, I think we would have known by now if there were tree spirits out there in the world.”
Liam’s head swam as he studied her. Then it struck him that he should have been a bit more weary of a strange woman showing up on his doorstep claiming to be a mythical creature of the forest. She was quite possibly insane—but she had helped him, regardless of whether or not she was mentally stable. He’d seen some rather convincing prosthetics for sale around Halloween. Maybe she’d taken the fantasy a bit too far.
“I thought this might be difficult to believe,” she sighed. She dug for a moment through the pockets of her sweater, pulling out the delicate seed of a maple. Liam recognized it immediately, the two thin membranes trailing off it like the wings of a moth. They were everywhere this time of year, falling to the ground and blown in the autumn wind.
Iona laid the the seed in the center of her palm. With a flourish of her other hand, the heart of the seed cracked open, and a curious green tendril reached upwards from within. The air around them seemed to crackle with unseen energy, and Liam’s eyes went wide. It was only an inch or two of fresh growth, but it should have taken days to occur naturally .
“That’s not possible,” he said, though the words were mostly for himself. Already he’d begun to doubt the things he saw, the words she’d spoken.
Iona handed him the sprouted seed, and he inspected it closely, looking for some sort of trick. But there was none to be found; it was simply what it appeared to be.
He sighed, pinching at the bridge of his nose. Though he was a man of science, a man of logic and observation, there was a part of him that wanted to believe. Of course there was something ancient and wise about these trees—he’d known it since he was a boy, known there was something more to it. It should be impossible, but when he’d put his hand on the trunk of her tree, it was like he’d felt its sentience. Like magic.
***
Iona saw the moment in which Liam started to believe, when the gears began to turn in his mind. She knew he was an observant man, one who trusted what he saw—so she had shown him.
It was cruel, she knew, to demonstrate to him in such an unpleasant moment that there was more to the world than what he saw. But now, after what she had seen of the strange men invading her forests, there was no time to soften the blow.
“Do you know which tree I am tethered to?” she said, determined to push the conversation forward. “I have watched you since you were small. I see the kindness in your heart. You love these trees as much as I do.” Heat crept across her cheeks at the intimacy of the confession.
“You were… watching me?”
“Well, it was my tree you sat under.” She ran a hand through her hair, the loose curls shaking free beneath her fingers. “Really things would be quite dull if we didn’t spend some of our time watching the humans in our forests, wouldn’t they?”
“I guess so. Earlier, when I touched the tree, I thought I felt…” he trailed off, but Iona knew exactly what he meant.
“That I do not understand. Perhaps it was simply a quirk of the magic that tethers our spirits to the tree. I will ask my kin about it,” she said. “But that is not the reason I am here. It is quite frowned upon for me to reveal myself to you like this, but it is urgent and I believe you can help. ”
“You want my help?” Liam asked incredulously.
Iona nodded, then stood and paced around the room. She used the opportunity to look around and indulge her curiosity. All the years she’d spent observing the humans in her forest, she’d never been inside their dwelling. If she was going to break the rules, she might as well sate her curiosity.
“I found a stand of trees, shorn at the base—harvested for their lumber, not far from the clearing where you encountered these strangers. I’ve been watching them, over the past few days, they appear to be scouting the area. Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t believe their practices to be… legal.”
“You think they’re stealing the lumber?”
“Yes, it is protected land, I believe.”
Liam’s face scrunched tight. Iona could see the exhaustion, the toll the day had taken on him, and her heart swelled with guilt. Perhaps it was too much trouble to force onto this unwitting human.
“A lot of the land nearby belongs to the state, or to the federal government. Sometimes they contract with people to cut it down. The lumber industry is pretty big around here,” he told her. Iona’s hope faded—she had misjudged Liam after all. She turned, preparing to retreat, but then he spoke again. “They don’t seem like they’re doing things above board though, like you said. Seemed awfully angry at my discovering them.”
Iona let a whisper of hope return, turning back to Liam with a slight nod. “It is wrong,” she told him. “And while we exist to protect our forests, our powers wane with the coming season of rest, and we are little match for the machinery the harvesters use. We simply aren’t strong enough.”
But Liam seemed to deflate before her, and Iona wondered what she had said that was wrong.
“And what do you think I can do about it? You saw me back there, I’m useless.”
“That is simply untrue.” Iona’s eyes bore into his with a fierceness that made him drop his gaze. Then she turned again, denying him an opportunity to protest, and swept around the small cabin.
Half-packed boxes filled with old books and photos lie strewn about the place. Worn blankets, some linen, some handmade were piled on the couch. Even in its chaotic state, the house exuded a warm and welcoming aura.
“This house has belonged to your family for generations, yes? It has been filled with love and memories that you cherish. Would you not fight to protect it?” She spoke passionately, but the words did not have the intended effect.
“That’s exactly the problem,” he muttered.
“What do you mean?”
“Well I’m only here for the weekend, really. We’re selling the place.”
Iona stilled, and disappointment that she felt washed over her. It was banished within seconds, though, as she returned to the couch and sat back down beside him.
“I believe you will help us. Even if your time here is short. There are markings, like those on the stumps left behind, on a number of trees which I believe belong to your family… at least that’s what the men in the woods believed. There are human systems to deal with this yes? Perhaps you may contact the authorities, before the property is sold. It is something we are unable to do ourselves.” There was no trace of doubt in her words—she let her faith in him shine through. For some reason, though, it only seemed to make him look more guilty. “You need not decide tonight, I see you’ve been through quite a lot, and you’ll need time to rest and heal. Meet me in the clearing tomorrow, and I’ll show you the fallen trees I have found. It is possible that I am wrong about the whole thing.”
Iona reached out and patted Liam’s leg, minding the wound she had helped patch up. Then, without another word, she vanished from the house to let him rest.