Page 8 of A Land So Wide
With resolve, she rolled the map into a tight scroll and tucked it into the satchel carefully. She wouldn’t let Louise taint it. She’d stop at the mill and show it to Ayaan Adair, her father’s second in command. He was certain to be pleased.
As she eased the satchel’s strap over her head, something from the periphery of her vision shifted, a pale slip of movement sliding through the trees.
Stealthily.
Soundlessly.
Greer strained her ears, baffled by the silence.
For as long as she could remember, Greer Mackenzie had heard things. Big things, small things. Things improbable. Things mostimpossible. The beating of wings far overhead, conversations from the wrong side of the room, flakes of snow landing upon branches deep behind her home. Sometimes she feared she could make out the heartbeats of every person within Mistaken, tiny, relentless pulses of life demanding to be acknowledged.
She didn’t know why or how, only that it was a truth she could not escape.
So why were the woods so still now?
A sudden terror staked into her middle. She could feel it pressing close, as suffocating as a damp blanket: the eerie weight of the uncanny.
Strands of her hair danced by her ear, swaying as if someone had softly exhaled just behind her, but she was too scared to turn. Too scared to see.
Something had crept up behind her, and she’d heardnothing.
The impossibility was too dreadful to bear.
Greer scrunched her eyes closed, unwittingly conjuring up images wild and fantastic. Demons and monsters too horrifying to believe. Trees that could move soundlessly through the forest like a wisp of mist. Trees with shining eyes. Trees with two toes. Trees with long, knobby fingers reaching out to scrape her bare neck…
“Hello, little Starling.”
Her eyes flashed open.
She’d heardthat.
Hadn’t she?
A voice, low and beguiling. Just behind her shoulder. A voice, as real as her own.
Greer licked her lips. She wasn’t going to look. She couldn’t bear to look. Except…
When her resolve slipped and she whipped around, the forest was still, and her offerings were gone.
2
Black clouds rolled inoff the mountain range to the northwest, setting the world dim long before Greer stumbled out of the tree line. They hung low, seemingly close enough to pluck down, as angry as a fresh bruise.
Great drops of cold rain soon began to fall, soaking the earth and Greer’s skirts in equal measure. She could already hear the tongue-lashing Martha would give her for tracking mud through the parlor.
She passed by one of the monolithic Warding Stones—the widest of their lot, with a chunk chipped away from the top that reminded Greer of a missing tooth—and traced her fingertips over its wet surface. Red iridescence flickered across it, as if welcoming her back. She felt an instant lightening as she crossed over the town line, like the setting down of a heavy satchel after a long journey. Her muscles loosened; it felt easier to breathe.
The Warding Stones were towering shards of black basalt that appeared wholly unremarkable until sunlight hit at just the right angle. Then they shone with a red-hued luminescence. Hundreds of them dotted the perimeter of Mistaken, a gift from the Benevolence, part of their decades-long truce.
The Stones were their protectors, holding back the Bright-Eyedsfrom ever crossing into town. The Stones were their jailers, keeping the people of Mistaken forever bound to the land.
Giving the forests behind her one final longing glance, Greer turned her focus toward the town. Whether she liked it or not, she was home for another night.
She paused at the crest of Barrenman’s Hill, and glanced across the cove at the rocky cliffs of the Narrows and into the Great Bay. It stretched out as vast as an ocean and was just as salty. Sleek whales, dark with banded fins, were regularly seen spouting close to shore, hungry for plankton and krill. In the spring, the harbor was loud with the barks of young seal pups. Louise had even claimed to have once spied a shark in deeper waters.
There’d been a schooner docked outside the Narrows for the last two days. Its crew had ferried in much-needed supplies while the captain negotiated lumber prices with Hessel and Ayaan.
Mistaken boasted the only mill up or down the coast that cut Redcaps and turned the bedraggled trees into handsome planks of wood. Demand for these trees was so high that merchants sailed thousands of miles across the sea, facing untold perils, just to reach their remote and isolated community. As mill owner, Hessel had been waiting for this schooner’s arrival all summer, rubbing his hands with impatient glee as he pre-emptively tallied the profits.
