Chapter 6: What the Silence Kept
The bark-and-moss woman led them east.
The property changed as they walked. Not dramatically, not the way the Vennwood changed in its deep places where the light went green and cathedral and the roots broke the surface like the backs of sleeping things. This was subtler. The ordinary forest thinning and reorganizing itself, trees spacing wider, undergrowth going sparse, the ground cover shifting from the layered complexity of healthy woodland to something simpler and more deliberate, as if the land here had been edited.
Kit kept her hand against the book through her jacket. The compact attended, alert and quiet, the way it went quiet in the presence of things it was still forming opinions about.
She heard the silent place before she saw it.
That was the wrong way to describe it. She heard the edge of it, the last of the ordinary forest sounds, a woodpecker somewhere above and to the left, the distant movement of something small in the undergrowth, and then those sounds simply did not continue. There was no fade. No transition. The woodpecker stopped between one strike and the next and did not resume, and the undergrowth went still, and they were standing at the boundary.
It looked, at first, almost normal.
Trees still stood. That was what struck her, the trees were still there, still upright, still holding their shapes against the sky. But the bark was wrong, pale where it should have been dark, smooth where it should have been furrowed, as if something had pulled the texture out of it and left the form behind. The leaves were present but colorless, not dead-brown, not autumn-yellow, simply absent of color the way a photograph goes when the chemicals fail, there and not there at the same time.
And the shapes were wrong.
Not dramatically. Not the kind of wrong that announced itself. The kind of wrong that you noticed in the corner of your eye and then looked at directly and could not quite locate, like a word you had read so many times it stopped looking like a word. The trees stood at the right angles, occupied the right spaces, cast the right shadows. But something in the relationship between them had been altered, something in the way they related to each other and to the ground and to the light, as if whoever had arranged them had understood the rules of a forest without understanding the reason for the rules.
'Stay on the path,' the bark-and-moss woman said. 'Don't touch anything.'
'What happens if we touch something,' Kit said.
'I don't know,' the woman said. 'I have not tested it. I do not intend to.'
They moved in single file. The bark-and-moss woman first, then Kit, then Morrigan on her shoulder and the many-tailed fox close at her heels. The Hollow King behind them, which Kit was aware of the way she was aware of a fire at her back, present and thermal and not quite safe. The stag last.
The compact went very still inside her.
Not the attending stillness, not the alert quiet it used in the presence of things worth considering. Something deeper. Something that was not quite fear because the compact did not fear, exactly, but was adjacent to it, the way a deep vibration is adjacent to sound. She pressed her hand harder against the book and the compact steadied, marginally, the way a frightened animal steadies when you put your hand on it without quite calming.
The path through the silent place was not long. Forty feet, perhaps fifty, a straight line between the pale standing trees toward the ordinary forest on the other side. She could see it, the return of color, the dark bark and green undergrowth, close enough that she could have thrown a stone and hit it. Close enough that it should have taken less than a minute to cross.
She became aware, halfway through, that the stag had stopped.
She did not hear it stop. That was the first thing. She heard nothing in the silent place, not her own footsteps, not the fox's small movements, not the Hollow King's particular silence layered over the silence of the place. She felt the stag's absence through the compact, a gap in the awareness the forest had given her, and she turned.
It stood at the midpoint of the path, exactly where she had been a moment before, and it was not moving.
Not the stillness of an animal that has decided to stop. Not the careful held-quiet of something listening. The stag was, she looked at it, the stag was vibrating. A fine tremor running through it from its hooves to the tips of its impossible antlers, so fine she almost missed it, a frequency rather than a movement. Its very dark eyes were open and fixed on something she could not see, something in the pale wrong trees to the left of the path, and its antlers, she looked at the antlers, the antlers were changing.
Not dramatically. Not quickly. But the tines were moving, very slowly, a glacial repositioning, and as she watched she understood that they were not repositioning randomly. They were orienting. The way a compass needle orients. Pointing at something.
'What is it,' Kit said, and her voice made no sound in the silent place, the words simply stopped at her lips, and she said it again and heard nothing, and felt the particular cold horror of that, of speaking into absence and receiving absence back.
The bark-and-moss woman had turned. Her face, the bark-and-moss of it, the green of it, had gone carefully still in a way that was different from her ordinary stillness, the way a person goes still when they are trying not to show that they are afraid.
She made a gesture. Move. Keep moving. She pointed at the far tree line and the gesture was clear even without sound and Kit turned and walked and did not run because something told her that running would be a different kind of signal than walking and she did not want to send it.
The fox pressed against her ankle. She felt it through her boot, warm and present and frightened.
She crossed into the ordinary forest and sound returned all at once, the woodpecker resuming as if it had never stopped, the undergrowth alive again, the wind in the canopy, and she turned immediately.
The stag was still in the silent place.
Then it moved. Not the careful gravity of its ordinary movement, not the slow geological patience of something ancient and unhurried. It came through the pale trees at a pace that suggested urgency without quite becoming flight, its antlers still oriented, still pointing at whatever it had found in the wrong trees, and it crossed the boundary and stood in the ordinary forest and the trembling stopped and its antlers returned to their natural configuration, and it stood very still for a long moment with its dark eyes closed.
'What is it?' Kit said, aloud this time, into sound.
The bark-and-moss woman looked at the stag for a moment before she answered.
'The stag is old,' she said. 'Older than I am. Older than the Standing Stones. It was here before the compact, before the fae lords, before the Hollow King.' She paused. 'It does not react to things. In all the years I have known it, I have not seen it react to anything the way it just reacted.'
'What was it pointing at.'
'I don't know.' The woman looked back at the silent place, at the pale wrong trees still standing in their uncanny arrangement. 'But the stag's antlers orient to root-weight. To places where the forest is deep and old and present.' She stopped.
'They were pointing into the silent place,' Kit said.
'Which means,' the woman said carefully, 'that something with root-weight is in there. Something old. Something that was forest, once, or something the forest recognizes as, ' she paused, choosing, 'kin.'
The Hollow King had come through last and stood now at the edge of the group, and Kit looked at him and found him looking not at the silent place but at the stag, with an expression she could not read in a face that had no eyes.
'You know what it is,' she said.
'I have a theory,' he said. 'I would rather reach the Thornring before I share it. Theories are easier to say in places where the wards still hold.'
Kit looked back at the ordinary forest behind them. At the path they had come through. At the pale trees just visible through the boundary, still and colorless and wrong, still standing.
Something at the edge of the silent place moved.
Not much. A shift in the wrongness, a repositioning of one of the pale shapes, subtle enough that she almost dismissed it as her eyes adjusting. But the compact moved against her ribs, a hard involuntary pulse, and the fox made a sound against her ankle, and she knew.
'Walk,' she said. 'Everyone walk. Now.'
