The Cartographer's Daughter: The Village Council

Tallow smoke curled from a stub of candle on the scarred oak table, and six pairs of eyes turned toward the door as Wren Calloway stepped through.

She had been told to expect nothing warm.

The back room of Brimwell's General Store smelled of lamp oil, dried lavender, and old money. Bundles of dried sage hung from the low ceiling beams, their leaves crackling faintly in the draft that slipped beneath the warped doorframe. A single window, small and high, let in a rectangle of grey evening light that fell across the floorboards like a dropped cloth. Around the table sat five men and a woman, and every one of them had stopped speaking the moment her shadow crossed the threshold.

Wren's boots found the loose board by the hearth. She had learned its whine the summer she turned nine, smuggling apples from the barrel beneath Old Tobias's counter, and she stepped over it now by habit. The room heard her skirt whisper against her stockings. It heard the small brass compass pendant shift against her collarbone. It heard, surely, the way her breath caught when the miller, seated nearest the door, narrowed his gaze at her like a man sighting down a rifle.

"Sit, girl." Auntie Cordelia's voice came from behind her, brisk and unyielding as a slammed ledger. "You asked to be here. Now be here."

Wren sat. The chair was harder than it looked, and her knees knocked against the table's underside. She set her hands flat on her thighs beneath the cloth so no one could see them tremble, and lifted her chin the way her father had taught her, the way one greets a map's blank edge: with attention, not fear.

The candle guttered. Wax pooled in the brass holder and crept toward the wood.

Auntie Cordelia took the remaining seat, the one nearest the window, and set a small jar of something amber and viscous upon the table. It caught the lamplight and held it like a wasp in amber. The farrier, broad as a doorway and twice as patient, glanced at the jar, then at Cordelia, then at the floor.

"Syrup of meadowsweet," Cordelia said, before anyone could ask. "For the cough that's gone about. Not the matter at hand."

The matter at hand, Wren understood, was herself.

Hester, who kept the inn at the crossroads and the village's oldest sourdough starter beneath a checked cloth, leaned back in her chair and folded her arms in a way that suggested she had been waiting for this exact moment since the autumn Wren's father had first ridden north and not returned. Her face was round and creased, her apron flour-dusted even at this hour, and her eyes, beneath their soft droop, missed nothing.

"So this is the cartographer's girl," Hester said, not to Wren, but to the room. "Cordelia, you could have warned a body."

"I did warn a body," Cordelia answered, crisp as a struck match. "I warned the body that brought her. I am not responsible for what that body did with the warning."

"Fair spoken," the farrier murmured, though whether in praise or protest was unclear.

Wren sat very still. She had counted the faces as a way of steadying herself. The miller, narrow-faced and watchful, his hands laced before him as if in prayer but knuckles bloodless with grip. The farrier, his beard the rust color of wet iron, who had once carried her on his shoulders through the midwinter fair. The thatcher, older than the rest, whose eyes never left the candle. Two men she did not recognize by trade or name, seated closest to the wall, their hats kept on, which the others had not. And Hester, the only woman besides Cordelia, who now reached across and pushed a small dish of bruised apples toward Wren as if offering a child a stone to hold during thunder.

"Eat," Hester said. "You're white as fresh dough."

"I am well, thank you, Mrs. Hester," Wren said, and was startled by how thin her own voice sounded against the low ceiling.

"Don't Mrs. me, child. Hester's the name my mother gave me and Hester's the name I'll answer to when they've nailed the lid down."

The farrier made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a cough. The thatcher shifted on his bench.

Then the miller spoke.

"The council has matters to discuss that do not concern the child."

Wren's spine straightened. She had not expected to be defended, but she had not expected to be dismissed quite so quickly either.

"Council," Cordelia said, and the word landed like a coin dropped on stone, "this child knows the Hollow Wood better than any living map. Her father's charts are in her keeping. Whatever we discuss tonight that touches the Wood's edge touches her inheritance, and her inheritance touches every lintel in this village. You may speak plain or you may speak around her, but she will hear one way or the other."

"She is not sworn," one of the hatted men said. His voice was flat, foreign to her ear, though she knew by his boots that he was born within a day's walk.

"She is sworn," Cordelia answered, "to her father's work and to her aunt's roof. That is oath enough for tonight."

Silence settled like flour dust.

Wren reached, with a careful hand, for one of the bruised apples. Its skin was cool and faintly waxy beneath her fingertips, and when she bit, the taste was sharper than she had expected, the brown bruise sweet in a way that made her think of long-kept jams and the back of the larder in winter. She chewed slowly. She had learned, watching Old Tobias negotiate with timber buyers in the spring, that the one who eats is the one who is not afraid.

Hester caught her eye and gave a small nod, as if to a pupil who had remembered her sums.

Then the farrier cleared his throat, a sound like a boot drawn from deep mud, and the meeting began.

"There have been lights," he said, "in the upper branches. Not foxfire. Not the lantern flies. Larger. They hold their shape."

The thatcher made the sign against the evil eye, his fingers moving with the quick practice of a man who did it often.

"And the boundary stones," the miller added, his voice thin as a blade's edge, "have been moved. All three. I walk that line on the first of every month and I have walked it since my father's father walked it before me, and I tell you the stones have shifted. Toward us. Not by frost heave. Not by root."

"By hand?" Hester asked.

"By something that thinks."

The room felt smaller. The candle flame leaned sideways as if listening.

Wren set the apple down. She felt the compass pendant swing against her throat, the brass warming slowly to her skin, and she thought of her father's notebooks, the pages where he had drawn the boundary stones as a child might draw teeth in a grin. Three black dashes, evenly spaced, with the word SETTLED beside them in his careful copperplate. He had believed the boundary fixed. He had written that word in ink that was now three years dry.

"I can walk the line," she heard herself say. "In the morning. I have the old survey. I can mark any change."

"You'll do no such thing," the miller began, but Cordelia raised one hand and the words stopped as if the fingers had closed about them.

"Let her speak plain," her aunt said.

Wren swallowed. The apple's sweetness still clung to her teeth.

"I am not my father," she said. "I know that. But I have his maps. And I have walked the edge more times this year than anyone at this table. If the boundary has moved, the maps will show it. If the maps show it, then we know more than we know now, and knowing more is the only thing that has ever kept this village whole."

Hester's flour-dusted fingers drummed once against the table, a small approving beat.

The farrier studied her a long moment, his rust-colored brows drawing together. Then he reached into his coat and brought out a folded square of paper, so creased and handled that it looked older than he did. He laid it on the table without a word, and the candle flame leaned toward it as if drawn.

"My grandfather's sketch of the Wood's edge," he said. "From before the road was cut. See for yourself where the trees begin and where the village ends. If your father's charts agree with that, then we have a fixed point. If they do not, then we have a question."

Wren reached for the paper. Her fingertips brushed the farrier's, rough as cured leather, and she felt him flinch, almost imperceptibly, at the cool of her hands. She unfolded the square carefully, smoothing it flat against the oak, and bent close enough that the candle's heat pressed against her cheek.

The sketch was rough, drawn in charcoal or possibly the black of a burned stick. A ragged line of trees, rendered in crosshatch so dense it seemed to breathe. Three dots within the trees, each circled, each marked with a single short stroke. Stones, she thought. The boundary stones, seen from the village side.

And beyond the trees, only blank paper. A margin of nothing. As if the man who drew it had run out of courage or charcoal or both at exactly the same moment.

"This is good," Wren said softly, and the farrier's shoulders loosened by a finger's width. "This is very good. I have the same three marks in my father's book. The same arrangement. If they've shifted, then something has changed the line itself, not merely our memory of it."

"Something," the thatcher muttered, "or someone."

His eyes flicked toward the door, as if expecting it to open. Wren followed his gaze and saw, on the far side of the room, a shadow that did not quite belong to any of them. It lay thin and patient against the baseboard, the shape of a man's shoulders and the slope of a hat brim, though the door was shut and there was no one standing near enough to cast it.

She blinked. The candle guttered. When she looked again, the shadow was only the shadow of a chair leg, plain and ordinary, leaning across the floor in the manner of all such shadows.

But her hands had gone cold, and the apple's taste had gone from her mouth like water from a cupped palm.

"Wren," Hester said quietly from across the table, and the use of her name, plain and unadorned, was the steadiest thing in the room. "You are pale as uncooked pastry."

"I am well," Wren said again, and this time she almost believed it. "I am well, and I will walk the line at first light, if the council permits."

Cordelia's hand found her knee beneath the table and pressed, once, firmly, the way one closes a book one means to open again.

The farrier nodded. The miller did not. The two hatted men exchanged a glance that Wren could not read, and the thatcher reached, with fingers that trembled only a little, for the small jar of meadowsweet syrup Cordelia had set upon the table, and held it up to the candlelight as if hoping to find the answer to the village's trouble swimming at the bottom of the jar like a leaf in tea.

The thatcher lowered the jar of syrup at last, and a weight settled into the room as if the syrup itself had thickened into something none of them could swallow.

"At first light," the miller said, and his words fell like a stone into a well. "You would walk the line at first light, with nothing but a satchel and that fool's errand in your head."

Wren lifted her chin. "I have my compass. I have my father's notes. I have the line sketched into the marrow of me, Mister Pembrook. I will need only the council's word."

"And if the council withholds it?" Cordelia asked quietly from the corner of her mouth, the way she always asked questions that were not really for the room.

Wren did not answer, because there were some answers that did not need to be spoken to be true.

The chamber door opened then, and a draft came in that smelled, oddly, of rosemary and woodsmoke and something sour beneath, like wet wool left too long in a dark place.

The woman who stepped through was small and broad, with hair the color of iron and a shawl of so many tangled greens it looked as though she had dressed herself in a hedge. She carried no lantern, though the stair behind her was black as a mouth. Her eyes, when they found Wren, were the color of November, and they held the same caution.

"So," she said, and the word was bright as a struck bell. "So, this is the cartographer's girl."

"Saoirse," said Cordelia, with the careful warmth one uses toward a creature one is not certain is tame. "You are welcome."

"I am welcome where I choose to be welcome," Saoirse answered, and her laughter was bubbling up beneath the words, the way laughter bubbles to keep a worse thing from surfacing. "And right now, Cordelia Calloway, I choose to be here, because the line has been creaking in my kitchen these three nights past, and I have had quite enough of my teacups rattling of their own accord."

She turned back to Wren, and her gaze was quicker than her mirth, and far more honest. She looked first at Wren's face. She looked then at Wren's hands. She drew a slow breath through her nose, as though she were testing the air for weather.

"You have been in the Hollow Wood," she said. It was not a question.

"The edges of it," Wren answered.

"The edges are what bit you." Saoirse tilted her head, and the iron of her hair caught the candle. "The scent of you is wrong, child. There is something of the place on you that will not wash out. I smell it. Old as I am, I smell it." The corner of her mouth twitched. "And I am not so old as all that, whatever Petunia tells the children."

A small shape darted past her then, a girl of perhaps nine with dusty pigtails and flour on one cheekbone, bearing before her a clay dish that steamed as though it had been pulled only this moment from the oven. She set it upon the table with a care that bordered on ceremony, and only then looked up, and her eyes went wide as saucers when they found Wren.

"Wren," she breathed, and then, louder, as if the name were a small bell she could not help ringing: "Wren, I have brought you a pie. Auntie Hester said you might be hungry and that you were too proud to say so, and I said, but Wren is never too proud, she is only busy being brave, and Auntie Hester said, well, busy and brave do not put weight back into a body, and I said, no, but pie does."

The chamber, which had been so full of caution a moment before, could not quite keep itself from softening at the corners. Petunia stood very straight, her hands clasped behind her back as though she had just delivered a proclamation to a king.

"Petunia," Wren said, and could not help herself. She smiled.

Wren sat down at the table and reached for Petunia's pie. The crust flaked under her fingers and let loose a scent of sage and slow-cooked onion that was, in its small way, the warmest thing she had smelled in a month. Petunia watched her with the rapt stillness of a creature who has just offered a dragon its favorite jewel and is waiting to see if it is accepted.

"Thank you," Wren said. "It smells like home."

"It is Auntie Hester's recipe," Petunia whispered. "But I carried it."

"I noticed."

Saoirse let out a small laugh, low and rough, more breath than sound. She settled back into her chair, and the boards of it creaked in a way that suggested it had known the shape of her for years. Her eyes, though, had not lost their sharpness. They moved from Wren to the empty seat at the head of the table, then to the window where the last of the dusk was thinning into something colder.

"Auntie Cordelia is late," Saoirse said. "She is never late."

"She is tonight," Hester said from the doorway, and did not seem to find it a small thing. Her apron was flour-dusted to the elbows and her hair had come loose from its pins in a way that said she had been moving fast. She stepped aside and the doorway filled.

Auntie Cordelia stood at the threshold. She was a tall woman in a long coat the color of dried thyme, and her face in the lamplight looked older than it had that morning. She did not speak at once. She looked at Wren first, and then at Saoirse, and then at Hester, and then at the chair at the head of the table, as though she were counting something she had not expected to find.

Then she came in, and the room arranged itself around her without anyone quite knowing it had moved.

"I am sorry to have kept you," she said. "There was a letter."

She did not say from whom. She set the folded paper upon the table beside the pie dish, face down, as if it were not to be read by anyone present. Her hand lingered on it a moment too long.

"Sit, Cordelia," Hester said softly. "The kettle is on."

"I do not want tea, thank you, Hester, I want the truth of this evening." But she sat. She folded her hands. The knuckles of them were white. "We have not been fair to one another. We have not been fair to the girl."

Wren set down her fork. Petunia, who had begun to climb onto the bench beside her, went very still.

"I have not come to this council with an open heart," Cordelia said. "I have come with the heart of a woman who lost her sister, and who watched her sister's husband walk into the wood and never walk out, and who has spent eleven years trying to keep one small door closed against what took him." Her voice did not waver. It was the kind of voice that could have wavered and chosen not to. "I have not wanted to hear that the door was open. I have not wanted to hear that there were footsteps beyond it. I have not wanted to hear that the child I raised has gone and stood upon the threshold and breathed in whatever it is that breathed in her, and come back smelling of it."

Saoirse's hand, beneath the table, found Wren's wrist and pressed once, hard, and let go.

"But she is here," Cordelia said. "And I am here. And the winter is coming, and whatever has begun cannot be put back into its box." She looked, then, directly at Wren. "So I have a proposal, and I do not ask anyone to like it. I ask them only to hear it."

She drew a breath that seemed to cost her something.

"The winter's trial."

The room changed. Hester's hand went to the place at her throat where she always touched her collar when a thing was serious. Saoirse sat forward. Petunia, beside Wren, had begun to breathe in the quick shallow way of a small creature that knows a name is being spoken that has to do with someone she loves.

"It is an old thing," Cordelia said. "Older than the village. Older than the guilds. In the old way, when a young person stood between two worlds, the village did not turn them away, and it did not take them in. It watched. It set them a task, and it gave them a season to do it, and at the end of the season the village looked at what they had done and made its choice."

"What task?" Wren said. Her voice came out smaller than she had meant.

"The task is not mine to set, nor yours to choose. It will be set by the council, and agreed upon by the heads of houses, and written down and sealed." Cordelia paused. "You will be told before the first snow."

"And if I fail?"

Cordelia did not answer at once. Hester answered for her, in the soft West Country way that made even warnings sound like bread baking in a warm kitchen.

"Failing the trial is not a punishment, my dear. It is an answer. The village will know, and you will know, what you are. And we will all go on living here together, with the truth of it."

"And if I pass?"

"Then you are ours," Cordelia said. "Truly ours. With seat and voice and hearth. And the maps your father left you become, by old law, the village's maps. To be copied. To be kept. To be used in common."

Saoirse let out a breath. "Cordelia, that is not a small thing."

"No," Cordelia said. "It is not."

"And you will agree to it?" Wren asked. "You, Auntie?"

Cordelia looked at the folded letter beside the pie dish. Her face, in the lamp, was the face of a woman who had been awake for many nights.

"I will agree to nothing," she said. "I will allow it to be proposed. That is all I will promise in this room tonight." She lifted her chin. "I have lived too long with my sister's name in my mouth to speak for her now without her. I will not say yes. I will not say no. I will say that I will abide by what the council sets, if the council sets it, and that I will not stand in its way."

It was, Wren thought, the most Cordelia thing she had ever heard. A door opened exactly one inch, and a hand held it there, and no more.

Hester rose. She went to Cordelia and put her hand on her shoulder, and Cordelia leaned into it for the briefest of moments, the way a tired horse leans into a steady hand, and then drew herself up again.

"Then it is proposed," Hester said. "We will speak in the morning, in daylight, with the heads of houses. We will set the task. We will write it down." She looked around the table. "Does anyone here refuse to come to that meeting?"

Saoirse shook her head.

Petunia, who had been listening with the ferocious attention of a small spy, shook her head too.

Wren said, "I will come."

Cordelia stood. The letter she folded once more, and this time she slipped it into her pocket, and the gesture had the feel of something being put away for later, for a private hour, for a trouble that was not yet ready to be made into a public thing.

"Good night, then," she said. "All of you."

She went out. The door did not quite close behind her. Hester rose to push it to, and the room felt the cold of the passage come in, and then the door shut and it was gone.

Petunia climbed onto the bench beside Wren and laid her head against Wren's sleeve. Her hair smelled of flour and of sleep not yet had.

"Wren," she said, very softly.

"Yes, little bird."

"What if the task is something you cannot do?"

"Then I will not be able to do it," Wren said, "and that will be the truth of me, and we will all know it, and the village will go on."

Petunia considered this with great seriousness.

"I will help," she said at last. "Even if it is something you cannot do, I will help."

Saoirse laughed again, that low rough sound. She stood, and the chair sighed as she left it. She crossed the room and laid her hand on Wren's head, briefly, the way one lays a hand on a door one has decided not to open yet.

"Go home, Wren Calloway," she said. "Sleep. Whatever the morning brings, it will not come any sooner for you sitting here looking at a pie."

"It is a good pie," Wren said.

"It is an excellent pie," Saoirse agreed. "Petunia carried it. That adds at least a quarter to its worth."

Wren stood. Her legs were stiff and her hands were cold and the bruise at her temple pulsed faintly with the beat of her heart. She put her arm around Petunia, and Petunia put her arm around Wren's waist, and they went out together into the passage, and from there into the street.

The village lay quiet under a sky that had cleared to a brittle scatter of stars. The smell of the wood was faint but present, a thread of cedar and something older, threading through the colder smells of hearth smoke and frost. Wren pulled Petunia's shawl up over her small sharp shoulder.

In the morning, the council would meet. A task would be set. A season would begin.

Tonight there was only the walk home, and the weight of a child's head against her ribs, and the slow wheel of stars above a village that had not yet decided what to do with her.

The wood knew before the village did.

Frost-fox stood at the edge of the Hollow Wood, where the last of the oaks gave way to the frost-silvered grass of the village common, and felt the night turn. Not a wind. Not a sound. A leaning of attention, as if the trees had been listening for hours and only now decided to speak.

She was not, strictly speaking, a person. She was not, strictly speaking, a fox. The village had called her Frost-fox for as long as anyone could remember, which was not very long because village memory was short and prickly and preferred its stories tidy. She was the color of birch bark in moonlight and moved the way frost moves: slowly, then suddenly, then not at all. Her eyes were the pale green of river water under ice.

She watched the small figure of Wren Calloway and the even smaller figure of Petunia move down the lane toward the apothecary, their arms around each other, their breath rising in two thin plumes. She watched until they turned the corner by the old stone trough, and then she watched the empty lane for a moment longer, as if the shapes of them lingered there.

Then she turned, and went into the wood.

In the morning, the council would meet. She had felt the decision coining itself through the night, a slow bright pressure under the skin of the world. Old Tobias had not slept. She knew this because she had passed his cottage on the ridge and seen the candle burning, and smelled the ink, and heard the faint scratch of a pen against paper. He was drawing something. He had not drawn anything new in years.

Hester had slept, but lightly. Frost-fox had passed the inn at the turn of the small hours and heard the soft clatter of a bowl being set down, and then Hester's voice, low and sing-song, talking to her sourdough starter the way other people talk to their gods. "Hush now," Hester had said. "We know. We have always known."

Saoirse had not slept at all. Frost-fox found her at the smithy, sitting on the anvil in the dark, turning a coal between her fingers until it burned down to a perfect sphere of ash. When she saw Frost-fox watching from the doorway, she did not startle. She only smiled, that low rough smile, and said, "I knew you'd come."

"I always come," Frost-fox said.

"Aye," Saoirse said. "And you never explain."

"There is nothing to explain."

"There is everything to explain, and you never do."

Frost-fox sat on the step beside the smithy door. The coal in Saoirse's hand glowed briefly, then dimmed. Somewhere in the wood, a fox screamed, the high tearing sound that was not pain but announcement.

"I heard them talking," Saoirse said. "The council. They mean to send someone into the Hollow Wood. Into the deep places. To find out what is moving there."

"Yes," Frost-fox said.

"And you know what is moving there."

"Yes."

"Will you tell me?"

"No."

Saoirse was quiet for a moment. The ash of the coal crumbled between her fingers. "Wren will want to go," she said. "You know that. Her father's maps. Her father's trail."

"Yes."

"And you'll let her."

It was not a question. Frost-fox did not answer it. The wood breathed around them, cedar and older things, and the stars began to thin at the edges as the sky remembered it had somewhere to be.

"Wren is not ready," Saoirse said at last. "She's brave, and she's stubborn, and she'll go anyway, and that is exactly what I'm afraid of."

"Then teach her," Frost-fox said. "Before she goes."

"How?"

"You know how."

Saoirse looked at her. In the dimness of the smithy, her eyes were very bright. "You could come to the council," she said. "You could stand up and say what you know. You could end this before it begins."

"No," Frost-fox said. "That is not my part."

"Then what is your part?"

Frost-fox stood. The step creaked under her, though she was light, lighter than woodsmoke, lighter than the memory of a footprint in snow.

"To be here," she said. "When the door opens."

She left Saoirse sitting on the anvil in the dark, and she went back into the wood, and the wood closed behind her like a page turning.

Morning came cold and gold. The village woke in pieces: the rooster at the Penningtons', the dog at the forge, the children called in from the lanes. Smoke rose from every chimney in thin straight lines, as if the village were trying to write something on the sky.

The council met in the back room of the inn, where Hester had laid out bread and cheese and a crock of butter so pale it was almost white. Old Tobias sat at the head of the table, though no one had asked him to. He had brought a rolled paper, tied with a cord, and he kept his hand on it as if it might escape.

Wren came in last, Petunia at her side, both of them hollow-eyed and stiff. Auntie Cordelia was with them, sharp-faced and watchful, her lace shawl pulled up over her hair. Marigold sat by the window. She was the oldest person in the village by some years, though no one knew exactly how many, and she said little and saw much, and when she spoke, the room listened the way the room listened to thunder.

Hester poured tea. The cups were blue and chipped and matched no one knew how.

"The wood is waking up," Old Tobias said, when the silence had lasted long enough. "Something is moving in the deep places. Something that has not moved in my lifetime, or my father's, or his father's."

"A metaphor," Marigold said, from the window. Her voice was thin and clear, like water over stone.

"Perhaps," Old Tobias said. "Perhaps not. The mist is wrong. The animals are wrong. Even the moss is wrong."

"The moss," said one of the councilmen, a thick man with flour on his cuffs.

"The moss," Old Tobias agreed. "It grows in the wrong direction."

No one laughed. There was nothing to laugh at.

Hester set down the teapot. "We cannot send a child," she said.

"We cannot send anyone," said Auntie Cordelia. "The Hollow Wood is not a place we send people. It is a place we avoid."

"Wren's father went," Saoirse said. "Into the deep places. And he never came back."

The room went quiet. Petunia's hand tightened on Wren's sleeve.

"I am not suggesting Wren go," Saoirse said. "I am saying that someone has gone, and that someone will go again, and that we should choose who, and how, and why, before the choosing is done for us."

Old Tobias untied the cord on the rolled paper. He spread it flat on the table. It was a map, but not a map of the village, or even of the wood as the wood was now. It was a map of the wood as the wood had been, or might be, or was trying to be. The lines moved faintly, even under the eye.

"This is his," Old Tobias said. "Wren's father. He left it with me. He said that if the wood ever woke, this would be needed."

Wren made a small sound. Petunia pressed closer to her.

"He also said," Old Tobias continued, "that the one who carried it would have to be part wood and part not-wood. That the door would not open for anyone else."

He looked up. He looked, for the first time, at Frost-fox, who had come in so quietly that no one had noticed her standing by the cold hearth.

"You," he said. "You know what he meant."

Frost-fox did not answer. The fire that was not there crackled anyway, a sound like ice cracking on a river in the first hour of a thaw.

"The door is already opening," she said. "It has been opening since Wren's father went through it. The question is not whether someone will go in. The question is whether they will go in knowing what they are, or not knowing, and being lost."

Marigold turned from the window. The morning light fell across her face, and for a moment she looked like a much younger woman, and then like a much older one, and then like herself again.

"There is a way," Marigold said. "There has always been a way. We forgot it, that is all. We forgot, and the wood forgot, and now we must both remember."

She looked at Wren. She looked at Frost-fox. She looked at the map on the table, where the lines were settling now into something that looked almost like a path.

"Two must go," Marigold said. "One of the village. One of the wood. The door will open for both, and close behind both, and what is on the other side will be what is on the other side."

The room was silent.

Wren stood up. Petunia stood up beside her, as if they were attached.

"I will go," Wren said.

"No," Auntie Cordelia said.

"Yes," Wren said. "I will go, and I will not be lost, and I will bring back what my father left behind."

She did not look at Frost-fox. Frost-fox did not look at her. But between them, in the cold hearth where no fire burned, a small spark kindled, and did not go out, and did not go out, and did not go out.

Outside, the sun rose over the Hollow Wood, and the mist began, slowly, to lift.